Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Sex

  • Categories: Limited; Inevitable; Necessary

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ “I wonder if we will ever stop putting people into these categories. Could we ever just allow people to be individuals?” The student said this as we were talking after class. What started off as a conversation about class, where we were discussing the politics of banning books in schools, became…

  • A Conversation with Holly Lawford-Smith

    by Moti Gorin ____ Moti Gorin (Colorado State) talks with Holly Lawford-Smith (University of Melbourne) about her new book, “Gender Critical Feminism” (Oxford University Press). Please pardon us for some choppiness in Moti’s audio/video. 0:00–25:06 Background and Opposition 25:06–35:00 Overview of Gender Critical Feminism 35:00–50:00 Gender Critical vs “Mainstream”/“Liberal” Feminism 50:00–58:55 Engaging with “the Literature”…

  • Doctor Wankenstein Goes to Japan

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ____ A PhD student of Japanese Studies at Manchester University (UK) recently published a paper in Qualitative Research, which has been condemned in the media and is now being investigated by the university and by the journal. Two things have caused offence: the research method (masturbation); and the material used during masturbation…

  • Our Own Naked Sun

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ___ In The Naked Sun (1957), Isaac Asimov imagines Solaria, a low-population world in which residents live on estates so large that one never encounters one’s neighbors in person. As robots are employed in virtually all manner of labor, the only human inhabitants of these estates are their owners. This contrasts…

  • The Uses of Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Imagine that you are in charge of some workplace. You look around and notice that while you are located in an area chock full of diversity of all kinds – racial, religious, and the like – your staff and customers are quite homogenous. Suppose that in your case, you are concerned…

  • Terfs, Transwomen and Trekkies

    by Miroslav Imbrišević ____ Recently I read a definition of ‘Terf’: they are “cis women who deny the womanhood of transwomen.” [https://www.zeit.de/zett/queeres-leben/2022-04/phenix-kuehnert-weiblichkeit-trans-frau]. That made me think about the question of group membership. How do you acquire it? Strangely, it is never through self-ID. Traditionally there are two routes: [1] via the current members; or [2]…

  • ‘Identify’

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Until about five minutes ago, if you’d asked me what some customary uses of ‘identify’ are, I would have given three: [A] Where one expresses sympathy for and solidarity with a group to which one does not belong, as in, “I identify with the plight of Afghan women, in the…

  • Helen Joyce on her NEW book: Trans — When Ideology Meets Reality

    by Daniel A. Kaufman _____ I talk with Helen Joyce, British editor of The Economist, about her new book: Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (Simon & Schuster). https://youtu.be/YW9aPRyKnZk 5:00 The overall aim of Helen’s new book. 11:20 The history and evolution of our conception of being transgender. 27:30 The current conception of being transgender, and…

  • Analysis of Variance and Causation

    by David L. Duffy Energy, matter and mind, after Szekely & Rizzo 2017 I have been reading some papers from the philosophy of biology on “causal selection”. That is, the identification of those entities or variables that are the most important explanation of the behaviour of some feature of a complex biological system, which might…

  • Sources of Human Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ People differ in all sorts of ways. Most of our differences generally go unnoticed when we interact. For example, with regard to a store clerk yesterday, I didn’t notice what her eye color or dominant hand is. But other differences, as the saying goes, make a difference. Historically and into the…