The first of these is that health-promotion campaigns around “lifestyle” issues dehumanize mothers with their imagery or text, stemming from the ongoing undervaluing and objectification of mothers and women. In this article, I focus on two problematic aspects of British health-promotion campaigns regarding feeding children, particularly regarding breastfeeding and obesity. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled.
We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. Claiming that a phonation is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. This article shows the role that Giacomo Casanova played in debunking these prejudices and presents his short manuscript on the issue as an important contribution to the literature of the Enlightenment, with its argument against women's supposed “natural” inferiority and for the idea that differences in education (rather than anatomical differences) were to blame for women's subordinate position in society.ĭetailed analysis of the “thinking uterus” debate illuminates the different ways in which various arguments from/by the “anti-uterine” lobby were used to justify the subordination of women: sometimes emphasizing the connection between the uterus and thought and sometimes negating it, but always concluding that women's inferiority is to be found in some known or yet-to-be-discovered anatomical, and mainly sexual, deficiency or problem.
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With its analysis of eighteenth-century epistemic and medical discussions about the role of the uterus in women's reasoning (or lack of reasoning), this article supports two arguments: first, that women's “flawed thinking” was a premise drawn by many modern intellectual men, one that was presented as based upon empirical evidence and second, that the pervasive construction of the uterus as an element that renders women wild, uncontrollable, and irrational continues to influence contemporary obstetrics (and maybe even to nurture obstetric violence), even as today's medicine and science consider themselves to be free of any such prejudices. The emerging area of philosophy of birth is invaluable, first, to diagnose fallacious assumptions about the relation between the womb and reason, and, ultimately, to challenge potentially damaging narratives with major impact on birth care. We conclude by calling for federal oversight of the acquisition and dissemination of information that prospective parents receive following a positive diagnosis of DS to ensure that it is comprehensive and up to date. The broader implication of the analysis is that epistemic justice is a precondition of reproductive autonomy.
We argue that this testimonial injustice constitutes a twofold harm: (1) people with DS and their family members who claim that parenting a child with DS may be a rewarding and joyous experience are harmed when they are systematically silenced, disbelieved, and/or denied epistemic credibility by medical professionals, and (2) pregnant women are harmed since they might make poorly informed choices without access to all relevant information.
They do so by discrediting positive parental testimony about what it is like to raise a child with DS. Applying Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice to prenatal screening, this article analyzes how medical professionals impair reproductive decision-making by perpetuating testimonial injustice. In practice, however, NIPT provides opportunities for intensified manipulation and control over women's reproductive decisions. Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) promises to enhance women's reproductive autonomy by providing genetic information about the fetus, especially in the detection of genetic impairments like Down syndrome (DS).
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