28: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
Interview with editor Dr. Mary E. Rawlinson, December 2008
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
The topic of today’s show is the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, a new semi-annual scholarly journal. Its interdisciplinary approach to ethical issues in the biological sciences draws from philosophy, public policy, and sociology, among other disciplines. The bioethical topics are addressed in readable articles likely to interest readers whether or not they embrace feminist perspectives.
To learn more about the journal and feminist approaches to bioethics, my guest is editor Mary C. Rawlinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook.
Steve: Dr. Rawlinson, let’s start with a big but basic question. What are feminist approaches to bioethics?
Dr. Rawlinson: I think that the basic idea that defines feminist approaches to bioethics is the idea that we need to take gender seriously from the beginning in thinking about health problems, or ethical issues related to health care. About ten years ago, I edited an issue for another journal on feminist bioethics when it was a relatively new field. One of the criticisms we got of the proposal was that of course feminist bioethics would only be interesting to women. That’s really a mistaken idea, because taking gender seriously in thinking about health and health care means that we start from a different perspective, but one that is just as generally human as the male perspective, so that we can learn things that are universally applicable by starting from women’s experience. I think we’re at a point in ethics generally, particularly in bioethics, where the concepts that we inherit from the tradition of rights and the social contract and the law of property and so forth are proving inadequate to the ethical urgencies that we are facing. We might discover if we started from the difference of gender and took women’s experience as something that was universally applicable, that we had a lot more resources than we might think in human experience to inform our ethical thinking. The field of feminist bioethics really gets established about 15 years ago with the establishment of the International Association of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, which was established by Anne Donchin from Indiana University, her colleague Becky Holmes, and Rosie Tong who is a distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina. These women were part of a larger group working on the idea of relational autonomy. Standard ethics begins from the idea that we are individual subjects, individual agents, and we have to do a lot of logical work to figure out how we’re connected and how our different interests are adjudicated. This group of mainly philosophers were beginning from the idea that what’s primary in human experience are our relations. You can see how this would be a particularly feminist perspective. You might begin from the mother-child relationship, as a relationship that can inform our ethical thinking. So it’s around this work in relational autonomy that the field of feminist bioethics really gets established. Of course now it has reached into every area of bioethics, from focusing on very sophisticated issues related to developments in new technologies, perhaps around our reproduction, but not exclusively so, to very global issues related to health and justice. In fact our first issue was really focused on the necessity to rethink bioethics generally as a kind of public health ethics, really taking a global perspective that’s somehow essential to bioethics. So I think feminist bioethics both contributes to ethical problems as they’re currently formulated in bioethics, for example related to new technologies, but it’s also challenging the very definition of bioethics, and calling for a kind of reconceptualization, in fact not only of bioethics, but of our basic ethical concepts and principles. As I say, that’s really what the first issue is about.
Steve: In the inaugural issue, Susan Sherwin argues that bioethics is, or at least should be, public ethics. You just alluded to that. She includes an example that young women deciding to have breast enlargements and their doctors should be fully conscious of the social issues involved, and society as a whole should be more sensitive to the consequences of social pressures. Could you expand on that for us a little bit, and describe her argument and its importance?
Dr. Rawlinson: Again, I think Sue Sherwin there is reflecting an idea that is centrally important to feminist bioethics, namely the idea that you have to see particular ethical relationships within the larger social context. It’s somewhat a Liebnitzian principle, that everything is connected with everything else. I think too often in bioethics we focus for example on the doctor-patient relationship without seeing that in its larger social and institutional contexts. Dr. Sherwin’s point there is it’s very important with regard to issues of informed consent to make sure the patient understands not only very specific things about procedures, but also there’s a larger context in which she’s making a decision. Again, this reflects the general principle of feminist bioethics that our decisions, even our identities, are to a large extent socially constituted and socially located, and can only be understood within these larger social and institutional horizons.
Steve: Dr. Rawlinson, my understanding of feminism is very superficial, but I gather from your journal and other sources that feminism is far from monolithic. Can you sketch for us a few of the major perspectives within feminism?
Dr. Rawlinson: This is a very good question to ask in relationship to IJFAB, because I often describe this particular community of scholars--IJFAB is the official publication of the International Association of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, which I alluded to earlier. I describe this particular scholarly community as relentlessly interdisciplinary, and within disciplines relentlessly diverse in its methodologies. Indeed I wanted to call the journal just “Feminist Bioethics.” I thought for marketing purposes it would be much more effective. But this community insisted on the title International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, thus marking not only its relentlessly international commitment, but also its commitment to the idea that methodological diversity is necessary in ethics. This goes back to this idea of taking gender seriously. I think feminism is, in general, in all of its forms, committed to the idea that our ethical subjectivities are historically constituted and historically situated, and that we need many different stories about what it is to be an ethical subject in order to understand ourselves effectively in relationship to the ethical urgencies that confront us. We’re not just abstract Kantian rational subjects, we’re situated in lots of different infrastructures and in different historical contexts, and we’re constituted by these, and reflect these. These need to be taken into account in our decision making. I’m not really talking about relativism here, because I think these different perspectives have their universal significance. That’s what’s important about taking gender into account. In terms of different methodologies, particularly within feminist bioethics, I think it’s several different scholarly communities that are constituted more by the kinds of problems they focus on. For example, there’s a whole community of people within the IJFAB community that work on reproductive technologies and issues related to them, whether it be in the clinic, or looking at ethical issues in research, as reflected in our second issue. This is a very diverse group in terms of their disciplines and their methodologies. You have philosophers who come from different traditions, you have sociologists working on these issues, you have physicians and other health care professionals working on these issues, anthropologists, historians. FAB and IJFAB provides the space for this kind of interdisciplinary conversation. Again, with everybody being sort of focused around the issue of how important it is to take gender into account from the very beginning when thinking about ethical issues in health care. You have another community within the larger IJFAB community that’s focused around issues of health care and global justice. Someone like my book review editor Lisa Eckenweiler is writing on transnational issues in caregiving. Indeed our next issue, which is coming out this Spring, edited by Arleen Salles and Constance Perry is going to focus on transnational issues in health care. Lisa Eckenweiler for example is looking at the relationship between certain ways of organizing health care in the United States and the relation of these to immigration policies, and other facts of immigration, and what kinds of ethical issues arise in this context. Ruth Macklin from Yeshiva University, who just gave a talk for us in a conference at Stony Brook-Manhattan celebrating the journal, has been doing a lot of work on health disparities in women in developing countries, again looking at the relationship between gender and justice in a global context. So there’s a whole scholarly community working on these issues, and they reflect not only disciplinary diversity, but real methodological diversity within disciplines. I’m a so-called Continental philosopher who reads Hegel and Derrida. Ruth Macklin is one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers in America, and yet IJFAB and FAB provides a space in which we have really meaningful exchanges around these issues. I think this is typical of feminism in general, that it has really challenged a lot of the old disciplinary or methodological divisions, and provides a space that moves beyond that.
Steve: What was the impetus to create a journal?
Dr. Rawlinson: Well, as far as I can tell, this journal is a result of a conversation between Kate Caras, who is the head of journals at Indiana University Press, our publisher (I call her mon ange [“my angel”] because she seems to solve all problems that arise) and Hilda Lindeman, professor of philosophy at Michigan State University and a former editor of Hypatia, the most distinguished journal in feminism. She and Kate had been working together for about five years publishing Hypatia, and out of a conversation they were having came the idea of a journal in feminist bioethics. This field has really established itself now, and is taken into account in all major reviews of bioethics. So Hilda took this to the International Association of Feminist Bioethics. They established a journal committee to explore the idea that was headed by Francoise Baylis who holds a Canada Council Chair at Dalhousie University, and she explored with her committee various presses. Eventually they put out a call for proposals for an editor over the various bioethical and feminist networks, and there was a competitive process that went on I think for about eighteen months. In January 2007 they invited me to take on the editorship of the new journal, which at that point didn’t even have a name. They were still exploring the contract with Indiana University Press. That was signed later that Spring in 2007. We had our first what I call “proto-editorial board meeting” in March 2007, and our first issue “Doing Feminist Bioethics” appeared in Spring 2008. So that was about seventeen months from appointment to first issue, which believe me was a very wild ride.
Steve: Is the job of editor about what you expected it to be, or have you had some surprises along the way?
Dr. Rawlinson: I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. I have done a great deal of editing. I’ve edited five issues of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and several books, but this is quite different. This wasn’t taking on an already established journal, which I think would have been a new and challenging experience. We had to create the infrastructure from the ground up. I felt at one point that I was living with Kate Caras and the then directors of FAB, Wendy Rodgers at MacQuarrie University in Australia and Carolyn McLeod at Western Ontario in Canada. We were on e-mail constantly for weeks coming up with the name, the infrastructure, editorial board, policies, procedures. Everything had to be created ex nihilo. That was a really exciting process, to be able to actually establish the mission of the journal and embed and embody it in that infrastructure. To me, that’s what’s great about doing the job of editor. It’s a collaborative process, and I love that, getting together with people and working through problems and producing something. Certainly the first issue would never had appeared as it did without the managing editors Brady Heiner and Chris Labarbera who were then graduate students at Stony Brook doing their doctoral studies. Chris now has an assistant professorship in New Hampshire and Brady’s finishing his doctorate out in California. They were just amazing, both in terms of their creativity and in contributing to the process of setting up the journal, and in terms of their ability to meet the deadlines. We have a really fabulous copy editor in Leslie Rubin, who manages to correct all our mistakes before they go to the printer. The people at Indiana University Press, Kate Caras, the head of journals, Judith Calwell from production, and Linda Bannister in publicity are all just wonderful to work with. That was really what I was looking for in taking on this job. I’ve done administration in the past. I like these sort of special projects. I have to be very grateful to my president, Shirley Strum Kenney, and my Dean, James V. Staros who support the journal. They collaborate financially with Indiana University Press to make it possible. In terms of what I expected out of the journal on the positive side, this collaborative effort has been great. It’s been wonderful to work with the board and the authors, the managing editors, the co-coordinators of FAB, to make something a reality that then turns out to be a real contribution to the scholarly community, and to advance the discourse, not only of feminism, but of bioethics generally. I think the response to our second issue particularly, the response to the first issue was great, the response to the second issue was really quite remarkable. Before it even came out in print we had a flurry of correspondence about one article in particular on the inclusion of pregnant women in research. Seeing those sorts of results and having the chance to collaborate with people in this productive way is what I find exciting about the project. It was a lot more work than I ever expected, and a lot more difficult than I ever expected. Though that’s sort of an interesting intellectual challenge, as well, coming up with the physical infrastructures that will support this kind of publication. It’s an interesting intellectual challenge that we’re still honing.
Steve: Did your organization ever consider the option of publishing the journal online-only, and making it Open Access, where it’s freely available to all, rather than going through the traditional subscription route?
Dr. Rawlinson: We did consider this briefly, and I think it was briefly for two reasons. First, we’re very committed to using the journal to promote feminist scholarship in bioethics, and particularly the scholarship of junior people. Quite frankly, in academia today, at least our perception is that the Open Access journals do not command the same kind of respect in the tenure process that a traditional in-print journal does. It’s also important that we’re an international organization, and there are very, very different criteria. For example, even within the Anglophone countries, there are very different criteria and rating systems, and very different review processes between the United States and Australia, for example. So we felt that this combination of having the journal available online for relatively nominal fees was best. We really talked about the financial threshold in terms of making the journal readily accessible to people and having traditional print was going to best serve our interest in promoting the scholarship of junior people. There is a second reason, which is perhaps more fervently held on my part than by most of colleagues, because I work on the philosophy of literature. I think it’s very important to have an in-print copy of the journal, because I think you experience a book quite differently than you do online content. There was just recently an article in the Sunday New York Times about the longevity and the perhaps near immortality of the book, and how it would not be put out of its misery by online content, wouldn’t be put out of existence by online content. If we had time to do a phenomenology of reading here, I think I could convince you.
Steve: Well, I’m a librarian, so I’m a pretty easy sell.
Dr. Rawlinson: Okay, very good. There’s something about the browsability, the portability of it, the way you can share it, that I think is very important. So that was a second reason, perhaps as I say more important to me than some of my colleagues.
Steve: Indeed, although several of the editors I’ve interviewed over the last few years have had a very similar perspective as yours.
Dr. Rawlinson: Well, there is a whole body of literature that I think demonstrates this very clearly. I’ve written on this myself, in terms of my work on Proust and Derrida, on the importance of reading as a physical and an emotional and intellectual practice. What you do online, looking at the screen is not like reading a book, for all kinds of phenomenological reasons. So I think it’s a really interesting philosophical point that’s actually supported by a large body of literature.
Steve: You said that feminist to bioethics has become fairly well established, but relatively recently. You also talked about it being a very international audience and authorships, with many methodologies. With it being so diverse, do you have difficulty recruiting qualified peer reviewers?
Dr. Rawlinson: Well, this is where the connection to FAB is so important. The journal grew out of the International Association of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, which is a sister organization to the International Association of Bioethics, which meets every two years in a variety of international locations. We just had our most recent meeting this September in Croatia. This gives us a sort of ready-made population to begin with, and we have lots of productive collaborations here. In fact, we have two colleagues, Angus Dawson and Marcel Verweij who are the editors of Public Health and Ethics, published by Oxford University Press, who call their journal our sister journal, and always promote us. So we always promote them. They’re doing really wonderful work, very closely related to the kind of work we’re doing in IJFAB. So there was a ready-made FAB network, listserv, a ready-made IAB network. The people at WHO were very involved in the International Association of Bioethics, so we had access to that network. Of course each member has his or her own network, so it was pretty easy to exfoliate out from FAB. Now having said that, let me say that we have sufficient submissions that I could really use reviewers, so if there are any listeners out there with expertise in some area of bioethics or ethics related to health care, please send us your name and affiliation at IJFAB@sunysb.edu.
Steve: Dr. Rawlinson, you teach philosophy at Stony Brook, correct?
Dr. Rawlinson: That’s correct.
Steve: What’s the interplay between being the editor of this journal and your teaching? Are they antagonistic, synergistic? How’s it work together? Are they two completely separate jobs?
Dr. Rawlinson: Oh, not at all. Most recently, my teaching has focused largely on our doctoral program. I’m very fortunate to be at Stony Brook, because my area as I’ve said is nineteenth and twentieth century Continental philosophy, and Stony Brook is the leading department in this area in this country. We have a kind of corner on this market in philosophy. So we have a really excellent population of doctoral students. We get about 250 applications a year. We maybe admit, I don’t know, fifteen to get ten. It’s extremely competitive, and they’re excellent, excellent students. My managing editors, as I mentioned, are drawn from this pool of doctoral students. Adam Rosenfeld, who’s one of my current managing editors who works on philosophy of technology was a TA for me in my 100 level class not too long ago. I serve on David Clinton Wills’ dissertation committee. He’s my second managing editor. Sarah McNamara, who’s working with us as an editor this semester and is going to take David’s position next year, is someone I’ve taught, I’m going to be her dissertation advisor, and she and I are co-founders and co-directors of the Luce Irigaray Circle. So this is very much integral to my graduate teaching, and very much something I did in part because of the experiences it would provide my graduate students, and the possibilities it would give me to collaborate with them. Indeed I’m sure the reason my president, Shirley Strum Kenney and my Dean James V. Staros the money I needed to do this is because they understood very well the importance of this for graduate education. Now one of the things we want to do is start integrating undergraduates into this. We’re just getting started. We’re not even two years old yet, so one of the plans we have is to apply for some work study assistants. We could really use some help. We’d like to identify two or three philosophy undergraduate majors who might want to work with us in some way. Again, it gives these graduate students a chance to make connections in the profession. Adam works on philosophy of technology, and is very interested in that whole end of bioethics. David Clinton Wills is working on the role of rhetoric in the treatment of AIDS, particularly in the African horizon. These contacts that they’re making, getting to read all the papers, getting a sense of what the field is in bioethics, it’s just really helpful to them in their work. I am not a person who sees these divisions that are so often made between teaching and research. In fact, I wouldn’t do something with my time that didn’t serve teaching, research, my institution, my students. I see administration, service, teaching, research as a kind of package that everything I do ought to be directed against. Anything else is just bad conceptualization.
Steve: Well, Dr. Rawlinson, thank you very much for speaking with me today. Our time is actually up.
Dr. Rawlinson: Can I just mention we have an issue on transnational issues in health care coming out in the Spring?
Steve: Okay.
Dr. Rawlinson: Our conference issue is coming out in the Fall. We have an issue on disability studies coming out in the Fall of 2009, and we just accepted a proposal for a special issue on ethics in psychiatry. So I thought you might be interested in those things.
Steve: Very good. Subscriptions to International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics are available through the Indiana University Press for $42 a year for individuals, or $85 for libraries. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I’m your host, Steve Black.