Learning from Disequilibrium and Educating the Feminine Voice in Philosophy

This article broaches what can sometimes be seen as the suppression of the female voice, sometimes the repression of the feminine. To address these matters involves the reconsideration of the political discourse that pervades education and educational research. This article is an attempt to disclose inequity in apparently equitable space, through the acknowledgment of the voice of disequilibrium. It proposes to re-place the subject of philosophy, and the subject of woman, through an alternative idea of the feminine voice in philosophy. It tries to reconfigure the female voice without negating its fated biological origin and traits, and yet avoiding the confining of thought to the constraints of gender divides. In terms of education, it shall argue for the conversation of justice as a way of cultivating the feminine voice in philosophy: as the voice of disequilibrium. This is an occasion of mutual destabilization and transformation of man and woman, crossing gender divides, and preparing an alternative route to political criticism that not only reclaims the rights of women but releases the thinking of men and women, laying the way for a better, more pluralist, and more democratic politics. The feminine voice can find a way beyond the dominance of instrumental rationality and calculative thinking in the discourse on equity itself. And it can, one might reasonably hope, have an impact on the curriculum of university education.

Laser Reduction Glottoplasty for Voice Feminization: Experience on 28 Patients

Objectives: Laser reduction glottoplasty is a relatively new surgical procedure for voice feminization on transgender women. This study aims to determine long-term voice results of glottoplasty on transwomen. Methods: Nonrandomized, retrospective, cohort. Tertiary referral center. Endoscopic laser reduction glottoplasty was performed on 28 transwomen. Voice Handicap Index (VHI-30), Transsexual Voice Questionnaire (TVQ), acoustic analysis with /a/ for F0, jitter, shimmer, noise to harmonic ratio and acoustic analysis for speaking F0 were measured before and after surgery. Patients self-evaluated their postoperative voices and medical students and 2 voice experts scored patients’ pre- and postsurgery voice samples as masculine, feminine or neither. Results: Mean total VHI and TVQ scores improved significantly postoperatively ( P < .001). Pre- and postsurgery mean F0 were 132 and 198 Hz and mean speaking F0 were 123 and 194 Hz, respectively; these variations were found statistically significant ( P < .001). Postoperative mean jitter, shimmer and NHR increased significantly compared to preoperative values ( P < .05). Nine patients (32%) were not happy with their postsurgery voice result and were offered anterior glottic web formation as secondary procedure. MFT women’s self-ratings of their postsurgery voices showed 3 masculine, 19 feminine and 6 neither outcomes, leading to patient gratification score of 68%. Medical students evaluated 79% of postsurgery voice specimens as feminine. Voice experts evaluated 75% of postsurgery voice specimens as feminine. Conclusions: Laser reduction glottoplasty is an accomplished and satisfying operation for feminizing voice of transwomen. Its voice outcome appears to be durable for 5 years. However, secondary operation may be needed to further gratify transwomen.

Hysteria as Alternative Masculinity in the Gothic Discourse of the 19th Century: The Case of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Guy De Maupassant

From its onset, the Gothic has attempted to challenge established norms and conventions, either for sensational effects or to question their homogenizing and reductive tendencies. The questioning or reinforcing of received notions of femininity in Gothic fiction has been much debated by critics, with the concept of masculinity coming second. The present paper discusses normative masculinity as it was perceived in the 19th century and how E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant challenge its validity by creating male characters who adopt a hysterical, almost feminine voice, contesting the belief that hysteria was a “female malady”. The characters expose their unconventional masculinity, which resists the model of the ‘ganzer Mann’ in Germany, ‘marketplace man’ in US and the ‘conjugal heterosexual’ in France.

María Sanchez’s Ecofeminist Poetry

This article aims to study María Sánchez’s poetry from an ecofeminist point of view. In particular, her work Cuaderno de campo is interpreted – following her last essay Tierra de mujeres – as an attempt to create a new feminine voice through the transgression of fixed discursive patterns. Specifically, we will focus on how poetry can ‘sabotage’ scientific discourse in order to build a new narrative that is able to overcome an approach to the natural world based on domination and exploitation. In fact, from its closeness to Nature, this voice claims a new identity based on the ethics of care and the understanding of the world as a web where all living things depend on each other.

Words of Her Own

Drawing on a spectrum of genres, such as autobiographies, diaries, didactic tracts, novels and travelogues, this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the emergence of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors as an ever-growing distinct category in nineteenth-century Bengal and the factors facilitating production and circulation of their creations. By exploring the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, religion, and culture in women-authored texts and by reading these within a specific milieu, the study opens up the possibility of re-configuring mainstream history-writing that often ignores women. Questioning essentialist conceptions of women’s writings, it contends that there exists no monolithic body of ‘women’s writings’ with a firmly gendered language, form, style, and content. It shows that there was nothing in the women’s writings that was based on a fundamentally feminine perspective of experiences with an inherent feminine voice. While describing the specifically female life world of domestic experiences, women authors might have made conscious divergences from male-projected stereotypes, but it is equally true that there are a number of issues on which men and women authors spoke in unison. The book argues for distinctions within each genre and across genres in language, content, and style amongst women authors. Even after women authors emerged as a writing community, the bhadralok critics often censured them for fear of their autonomous selfhood in print and praised them for imparting ‘feminine’ ideals alone. Nevertheless, there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tutored tastes, thus creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.