Introduction

Fifteen years ago feminist approaches in bioethics emerged as a distinct and recognizable constituency. For the most part, the established scholarly field of bioethics greeted its appearance in one of two ways. Some critics argued that a feminist bioethics could supply only a "partial ethics," an ethics that would address only women. Others welcomed the feminist perspective, but only while insisting that its concerns, concepts, and methods were already anticipated by and merely specifications of dominant political and ethical theories derived from the ideas of contract, law, and the rights of man.¹

It was as if the masculine marking of the subject in the history of ethics and politics made no difference. Just as medicine has often assumed that it could approach the female body through nosologies and clinical practices drawn from a study of the male body, philosophers and theorists in ethics and politics seemed to think that if feminism requires an extension of the rights of man, it does not require any rethinking of the basic concepts and strategies of bioethics itself.

This assessment assumes that man, the subject of both the sciences of man and the rights of man, supplies an absolute generic. Thus, women's experience is either a special case, whose logic may apply only to itself, or its difference is irrelevant and can be subsumed without harm or loss under the generic man.

From the beginning, feminist bioethics was suspicious of this logic of abstraction in both medicine and bioethics. Its approaches were informed by the feminist critique of this sleight of hand, in which a specific historical experience is installed as the absolute universal in science or ethics. As Anne Donchin and Margrit Shildrik note in this volume, early on feminist bioethics disputed the adequacy of abstract universal norms. Feminist approaches to bioethics challenged the field for its reliance on abstract principles disconnected from the material conditions of action and the specificities of the relationships in which ethical urgencies arise. Feminist bioethics continues to contribute significantly to this critique of abstraction in ethics by exposing the complicity of its supposedly generic subject with concepts of property, propriety (norms), and privilege, as well as with the material practices that these concepts authorize in relation to others.

From the beginning, however, feminist bioethics insisted, as well, on the positive project of turning to women's experience and women's bodies as points of departure in science, politics, and philosophy, as resources or sites for the production of concepts that might function generically, informing us about human experience. In her scholarly history Donchin cites the "strong argument" from Susan Wolf's 1996 essay that "mainstream bioethics had been impoverished by ignoring feminist theory and perspectives." Thus, from the very beginning feminist approaches to bioethics have refused, as Wolf did, to be confined to a special set of "women's problems" or to relinquish the claim that women's experience might reveal something universal about ethical agency and ethical urgency.

Indeed, early on scholars coalesced around the idea that doing justice, not only to the experience of women and other marginalized groups, but also to our human experience would require a fundamental refiguring of the concepts of ethics. Within the larger feminist critique of abstraction, feminist approaches in bioethics criticized, in particular, the focus of bioethics on individual agency and the principled calculation of rights and duties between individual subjects. Feminist approaches in bioethics developed a concept of the ethical subject as relational and defined by actions in a world of others.² In a remarkable, if often unacknowledged, kinship with Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophies of the body and difference that is explored by Margrit Shildrik in her essay, feminist approaches to bioethics developed an account of agency as socially and historically constituted, as inseparable from its specific world and relations with others.

This recognition of the relationality of ethical agency prompted attention to the question of what material infrastructures are necessary to sustain our life in common and how these are to be produced. On the one hand, feminist approaches in bioethics understood individual agency to be impossible without these collective structures. On the...