%0 Journal Article
%T Review of Feminist Bioethics At the Center, On the Margins, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel E. Baldwin-Ragaven, Petya Fitzpatrick
%A Maureen Sander-Staudt
%J Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine
%D 2010
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1747-5341-5-18
%X "Supposing truth is a woman--what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women?" ~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1]Nietszsche can hardly have been considered a feminist in his time, much less a bioethicist, but his 1886 question relating truth and sex-based experience has relevance for bioethical studies today, as demonstrated by the new anthology, Feminist Bioethics, edited by Jackie Leach Scully, Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven, and Petya Fitzpatrick. This collection features fourteen essays by authors committed to revealing bioethical insights putting questions of sex and gender at the fore, and taking women's experiences seriously. As the editors put it, "feminist bioethics starts from the premise that dominant ways of doing bioethics are fundamentally gendered and that they thus contribute to culturally inscribed oppressive practices" (3, original emphasis). According to the editors, mainstream bioethics encourages oppression in two ways--first, by featuring subject matter that reflects masculine experience and priorities, and second, by developing ontological and epistemological foundations that privilege ways of knowing that are masculine, devaluing what is culturally coded as feminine. With commentary from the editors throughout, this book details how mainstream bioethics benefits from the inclusion of feminist analyses, and is of interest to anyone who has an interest in bioethics and diversity.The book is divided into four sections, tracing how feminist bioethics theoretically and methodologically challenges mainstream bioethics, and how these approaches may or may not be useful for exploring difference in other contexts. It begins with a triad of essays providing an historical overview of feminist bioethics. In the lead essay, Anne Donchin reviews the accomplishments and potential areas of future scholarship of the International Network for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB,
%U http://www.peh-med.com/content/5/1/18