ABSTRACT
Feminism and feminist ethics address how people can live together in healthy, productive, mutually satisfying ways and can alter social or political obstacles to a healthy, productive mutually satisfying life. Since media are integral to contemporary culture, feminism’s commitment to ways of thinking and acting that are transformative and interventionist explains feminisms’ concerns with media practices and content. Feminist theorizing, however, may seem a vague resource for helping to resolve ethical dilemmas in media and communication in part because feminists insist on contextualization. Most reject claims that ethical codes can be deduced from a set of timeless, logical, hierarchically-arranged rights; they resist universalizing, abstract, and disembodied conceptions. Furthermore, multiple approaches to ethics have emerged from feminism’s differing accounts of how social relationships emerge in the fi rst place: “Feminist ethics comprises a complex and theoretically disunifi ed body of work” (Calhoun, 2004, p. 8). Feminists repudiate philosophies that deauthorize women as moral agents or exclude women’s experiences as a source of moral refl ection. But, among other issues, they debate whether women and men engage in the same modes of ethical reasoning.
