This spring semester students in Dr. Megan Burke’s PHIL 276 Gender & Social Justice participated in a cross-country reading group with students in a feminist philosophy course at Worcester State University in Worcester, MA. The reading group studied Down Girl (Oxford University Press, 2018), a recent book in feminist philosophy written by Dr. Kate Manne.
In Down Girl, Manne answers the questions: What is misogyny? What is its relation to patriarchy and sexism? What does misogyny do to women? And why ought we care about the reality of misogyny?
As a moral philosopher, Kate Manne insists that the philosophical study of misogyny is important if we are to understand whether, how, and under what conditions gender shapes and undercuts our values and our individual and collective sense of obligation and responsibility. In studying the book, SSU students discussed the moral significance of understanding misogyny, thinking especially about the reality of the hostility and punishment girls and women face and why we ought to come to terms with it.
As a final project, SSU students created memes related to Down Girl. Their aim was to make feminist philosophy and the philosophical study of misogyny go viral!
