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Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Phyllis Rooney
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Abstract

Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and metaphors that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element—body, passion, nature, instinct—that is cast as “feminine.” Drawing upon philosophical insight into metaphor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conceptions of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The politics of “rational” discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully inhibit the voice and agency of women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 77 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by Hypatia, Inc.

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