The realities of the Anthropocene, from climate change to pandemics to plastics, necessitate substantially different ways of understanding what it means to act in the world today. In response, feminist scholars within the field of new materialism have attempted to rethink the nature of agency and action. This article focuses on two unresolved challenges with their framework: first, it lacks a way to make distinctions or draw boundaries between different entities and actors and, second, it simplifies the relationship between ontology and ethics, implying that an ontological transformation will lead to more ethical and just relationships with the more-than-human world. I argue that to address these challenges new materialism should look to ecofeminism, particularly the philosophy of Val Plumwood; this pairing is especially pertinent considering the often overlooked or downplayed genealogical connections between them. I also argue, however, that new materialism has something to offer Plumwood: its reconceptualization of agency better responds to contemporary circumstances in ways foreclosed by Plumwood’s more limited account. I conclude that a coalition between new materialism and ecofeminism—a new materialism supplemented and modified by aspects of Plumwood’s account—provides valuable conceptual tools with which to respond to the Anthropocene condition.

Sex work is highly gendered, with 80 percent of sex workers being female, and the vast majority of buyers of sex being male. It is often taken for granted that this is how it is, and implicit in much of the debate around sex work is the assumption that it is inherently gendered. In this paper, I question this assumption, drawing on sociological research to challenge arguments which purport that it is inconceivable that women would ever want to pay for sex, or that sex work would exist under conditions of gender equality. I argue that gendered sexual norms likely are a significant reason for why sex work is so gendered, but sex work would probably continue to exist under conditions of gender equality, due to the diversity in motivations people have for buying and selling sex. Acknowledging that sex work is not inherently gendered is important for (at least) two reasons. First, it is probable that the gendered nature of sex work contributes to the stigma and bad treatment that sex workers, particularly female ones, face. Secondly, if sex work is not inherently gendered, this will have implications for how we should think about it, morally, practically, and legally.

Caleb Ward interviews Black feminist writer, poet, educator, organizer, and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Audre Lorde’s spirituality, her ecological political praxis, her pedagogy, and the cross-generational scale of social change.

This paper critically addresses the logics of exceptionality inherent to emerging regulations of the gender field, with a focus on Spain’s recent self-determination-based regulation of gender. To achieve this, it offers a biopolitical analysis of the concept of “public order” and its influence on gender governance, drawing parallels to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception and exploring the connections between contemporary regulations and the gendered public order of nineteenth-century France. Finally, it analyzes the exclusions and restrictions that the Spanish trans law reserves for migrants, non-binary people, and minors, contributing to the ongoing discourse on the limitations to gender autonomy in contemporary Western societies.

In this paper I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth-century France. Although forgotten after her death, Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but with very few notable exceptions, her philosophical work is still in the margins. In addressing this gap in the literature, I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of ideas, particularly focusing on her contribution to process epistemologies. I argue that Germain was a truly transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre and that her philosophical work should be mapped in the wider field of process philosophies. In doing so I make connections between Sophie Germain and Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, particularly focusing on their take on feelings, prehensions, happy ideas, and events.

This paper reflects on representations of the convergence of Islam and feminism in light of the recent uprising of Iranian women. Most of the existing literature discussing Muslim women’s rights are locked in a dichotomy of approaches, one being prejudicial and the other apologetic. The prejudicial approach is a (neo-)Orientalist one. It understands Muslim societies as backward and their redemption in abandoning Islam and following the lead of the “West.” The apologetic approach is a multiculturalist one, advocating most prominently by academic feminists based in Europe and United States. In trying to reclaim agency for Muslim women, this approach denies real oppressions happening in Muslim societies, and as a result of Islamic practices. Inspired by Iranian women’s fight for freedom, this paper challenges the aforementioned dichotomy, and instead calls for a third approach that begins with, and responds to, the lived experiences of women living in Muslim societies.

In this paper, we propose a performative account of hinge epistemology to make the case for a feminist hinge epistemology. We characterize it as follows: 1) there are hinges that enable and govern our ordinary epistemic practices, functioning as rules; 2) these hinges are enacted and actualized in the specific actions of agents that participate in such practices; 3) this makes room for the transformation and emergence of hinges; 4) against this background, we argue in favor of the possibility of feminist hinges. This novel account opens the way for hinge epistemology to be useful for feminist goals in epistemology, which we believe is the ultimate criterion for hinge epistemology to be legitimately feminist.

(Re)visiting the testimony exhibition part of Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, I focus on one testimony in particular. This testimony was given by a survivor of the “comfort women” system, a state-sponsored regime of military sexual exploitation and core institution in the Empire of Japan’s expansion 1932–1945. The testimony was then withheld before the exhibition opened. I approach this “withheld testimony” as an invocation of rupture to the time, space, and positionalities informing the museum narrative. The paper interrogates the interplay of the survivor’s act of withholding her testimony, the curatorial decision to represent the absence that followed on the withholding, and the disruption to the museum narrative that the withholding prompts. By exploring the withheld testimony as a speaking silence, visible emptiness, and present absence, the paper offers a rethinking of model victimhood under the comfort women system.

In this article, I identify a conceptually distinct form of epistemic appropriation: the creation and proliferation of the epistemic fata morgana. An epistemic fata morgana is a hermeneutical resource that is hollowed out, stripped of its meaning and political power, and yet, posited as if it were still accessible. This resource is taken up by dominant knowers in a way that preserves only its perception, but not access to it. This process is illustrated by an examination of the resource “sexual harassment” within the university context. The epistemic fata morgana is an important addition to the field of epistemic injustice for it lends itself to highlighting the frustration that is felt by marginalized people, especially within institutional contexts.

Obstetric violence is a structural form of gender, medical, and sexual violence perpetrated by health providers and institutions during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. It can produce physical, psychological, and symbolic harm to pregnant/birthing people and their families. Obstetric violence results from structural conditions in the technocratic model of birth and the acceptance of biomedicine as the authoritative knowledge in health care. This phenomenon produces patients’ loss of autonomy and capacity to provide informed consent, which increases their vulnerability to unjustified medical procedures, resulting in negative birth experiences. In this paper, I argue that individual autonomy is necessary but not sufficient for legitimately consenting to obstetric care and preventing violence. The liberal framework of individual autonomy often ignores that childbirth is a social event where multiple individuals and cultural factors influence the consent process. Consequently, I discuss the role of relational autonomy in obstetric decision-making and describe some structural barriers that negatively intervene in this process. Finally, I propose that doulas and midwives can help nurture autonomy and caregiving skills in obstetric patients and health providers. This strategy protects the informed consent process, prevents obstetric violence, and can be effective in recentering childbirth in pregnant people and their families.

The oversight of Chinese feminist traditions in transnational feminist discourse is remarkable given China’s historical importance and vast population. Despite historical suppression by Confucianism, Chinese feminisms emerged at the turn of the last century, drawing from Marxist, anarchist, and liberal movements. While scholars increasingly recognize overlooked female thinkers like Ban Zhao, contemporary discussions of China often revolve around reconciling Confucianism and feminism. This tendency underscores the perception of Chinese feminism as a derivative of Western feminism, where modern thinkers reject local culture for transnational movements. This paper contends that Chinese feminists, including Kang Youwei and He-Yin Zhen, remained deeply rooted in their traditions. While Kang incorporated foreign ideas to advocate for feminist goals and modernize society, he predominantly engaged with traditional philosophy to address its sexist elements. Similarly, He-Yin’s anarcho-feminist approach integrated Western influences to engage with traditional Chinese thought rather than rejecting it outright. By examining prevalent gender and selfhood concepts in traditional Chinese thought, this paper elucidates the notion of “correlative sexism,” and argues that women were not primarily regarded as a “second sex” as described by Simone de Beauvoir. The paper then demonstrates how Kang and He-Yin responded to this sexist discourse, offering novel perspectives on women’s liberation and societal reform.

What would birth be like in a feminist world? In this essay, I explore this question, asking what feminist freedom means in relation to birthing. Engaging in an imaginative inquiry that is rooted in respect for plurality, I explore the multifaceted dimensions of what we, as feminists, are fighting for in relation to birth. Building on a diverse array of feminist theories and philosophies of freedom (including the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Drucilla Cornell, and Marilyn Frye) and inspired by the work of Iris Marion Young on the five faces of oppression, I outline five faces of birthing freedom, namely: (1) freedom from oppression, (2) freedom to labor, (3) freedom to be-in-relation, (4) freedom from violence, and (5) freedom to imagine. I argue that these faces are all necessary conditions for the realization of birthing freedom. At the same time, the five faces of birth freedom that I outline here are only provisional and are grounded in my specific standpoint. My approach recognizes plurality and is not meant to be exhaustive but rather hopes to spark imaginings, invite extensions and revisions, and initiate conversations.

The paper presents a Wittgensteinian account of the concept woman, in terms of family resemblance. This approach is deemed superior to the Carnapian account, championed by Sally Haslanger, in that it allows for more inclusivity and to locate the source of sexism not so much in the very concept of woman but in the beliefs sexist people have about women. The compatibility of this account with semantic externalism is explored, as well as its relationship with stereotypes and paradigmatic examples of women. It is further shown how present-day attempts to extend the application of the concept of woman beyond human females may be made sense in terms of a change of hinges—that is, of the rules of evidential significance, which a community of speakers brings to bear on the determination of whether a person is a woman. Finally, it is argued that, despite Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical quietism, such an account is politically significant. This in turn shows that in fact Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical pronouncements far from being inimical to political and societal change may in fact be conducive to it.

In this paper, we consider a range of trans-inclusive approaches to gender concepts and how they relate to the world, from family resemblance theories to conceptual engineering. In so doing, we shall also examine several concepts that are analogous to gender and other controversial and not-so-controversial concepts, such as “vegan cheese” and “adoptive parents.” Having assessed their merits and demerits, we argue that our gender concepts are not fixed in stone but, rather, evolve alongside human practices and behavior.

The need for gender recognition is widespread, even when hypervisibility and other effects of trans antagonism make that need dangerous for trans people. This reason partially accounts for why, in trans critique, recognition is a dirty word. As a political aim, and to some extent as a moral norm, trans critiques encourage dropping recognition. On the other hand, social philosophers often view recognition as a solution to misrecognition and take recognition to be a remedy for injustice. In my view, recognition should neither be dropped nor held as a foundational norm for trans emancipation. First, I present three ways trans recognition is ambivalent. Second, evaluating Axel Honneth's observations about the entwinement of recognition and domination, I argue that recognition is an ambivalent norm for trans critique and struggle. Third, I propose studying trans recognitive practices (rather than recognition in abstract) and I illuminate what might set trans/t4t recognition acts apart from their cis-grounded analogues, centering the roles of the body and space/place as resources of trans/t4t recognitive practices, and how such practices focus on the subject's change and becoming over their identification.

In their recent book, Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics, Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek reconstruct Hannah Arendt's concept of natality in order to diagnose and resist biopolitical threats to democratic plurality. Their analysis leads them to engage indigenous reproductive justice organizing; that engagement is the focus of my critique. I argue that their understanding of the biopolitical targeting of indigenous people needs further development. Diprose and Ziarek tend to read indigenous organizers as working toward inclusion in the democratic plurality of settler societies. While that is the aim of some indigenous organizations and actors, that is not the aim of many, including a theorist and activist they engage, Katsi Cook (Mohawk). I suggest that their engagement with indigenous reproductive justice organizing is shaped by the important, but unthematized role settler colonialism has in Arendt's work. I further argue that Cook provides crucial theoretical and practical challenges to the settler state and its role in feminist theoretical projects of critique.

Comparative studies have identified “Antigone's sisters” across the globe, excepting for Southeast Asia. Yet in Vietnam, there exists Kiều, the protagonist in Nguyễn Du's The Tale of Kiều, whose cultural significance is comparable to Antigone. What insights can be gained about feminist political power by comparing Antigone to Kiều? Proposing a shift in focus on Kiều and Antigone's love from the questions of who and why to how, the paper argues that their love shares three fundamental commonalities related to their living conditions, actions, and choices. First, they are women who live a life full of love in worlds where love is forbidden. Secondly, they are women who practice love during dark times. And third, they choose to love in unconventional ways, and in doing so, they engender possibilities, particularly in terms of contemplating the interplay between life, death, and freedom. This analysis demonstrates a multiplicity of women's love and the experiences that possess a transcultural dimension, one that signals a type of harmony in the resistance of war through love. Therefore, Antigone and Kiều represent a different direction of a feminist world-building project—that of constructing a world through love.