“Safe sex” discourse attempts to protect women from dangers assumed inherent in erotic life, such as domination, submissiveness, and loss of freedom and self-control. However, Beauvoir's and Merleau-Ponty's revision of Sartre's ontology suggests that erotic life involves a kind of generosity that transforms existence; sex neither liberates personal existence nor poses a necessary threat to women's freedom. I also reconsider the conditions under which sex is assumed to involve a violation of being.

This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided’ ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.

This paper reconsiders the use of the term “victim” in feminist theory to attempt to find common ground for the intersection and interconnection of Western and indigenous feminisms. The role of the victim in the discourse of victimology, a branch of criminology, is assessed and applied to the work of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Lata Mani who both examine the construction of women's subjectivity in the practice of “sati” in India.

Do women conceptualize—understand, know about, and react to—shame differently from the way men do? Does the experience and knowledge of shame have a gender-specificity, and along what lines could it be analyzed? By introducing a distinction between life or enduring experiences, “Erfahrung,” and episodic or occurrent experiences, “Erlebnis,” andby juxtaposing this distinction with the Rylean notion that knowledge is dispositional this paper argues for the plausibility of a gender-specificivy.

Wollstonecraft's early works express a coherent view of moral psychology, moral education and moral philosophy which guides the construction of her early fiction and educational works. It includes a valuable account of the relation between reason and feeling in moral development. Failure to recognize the complexity and coherence of the view and unhistorical readings have led to mistaken criticisms of Wollstonecraft's position. Part I answers these criticisms; Part II describes and textually supports her view.

Commentators on the work of Catharine Macaulay acknowledge her influence on the pioneering feminist writing of Mary Wollstonecraft. Yet despite Macaulay's interest in equal education for women, these commentators have not considered that Macaulay offered a self-contained, sustained argument for the equality of women. This paper endeavors to show that Macaulay did produce such an argument, and that she holds a place in the development of early feminism independent of her connections with Wollstonecraft.

This essay analyzes the implications of the performative aspects of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror by situating this work in the context of similar aspects of her previous work. This construction and its relationship to abjection are integral components of Kristeva's notion of practice and as such are fundamental to her critique of Hegel and Freud.

The dualistic structures permeating western culture emphasize radical discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, but receptive attention to nonhuman others discloses both continuity and difference prevailing between other forms of life and our own. Recognizing that agency and subjectivity abound within nature alerts us to our potential for dominating and oppressing nonhuman others, as individuals and as groups. Reciprocally, seeing ourselves as biological beings may facilitate reconstructing our social reality to undo such destructive relationships.

Cheshire Calhoun argues chat thinking of lesbians as a subcategory of women provides an insufficient basis for considering key differences between lesbians and straight women, and that these politically significant differences are therefore erased by theories and politics that take the subject of feminism to be women. Here 1 look closely and critically at CaJhoun's own account of lesbian differences, and argue that sexual desire, while complicated, ought to remain central in any such account.

Cheshire Calhoun has been working to distinguish lesbian oppression from the sexist oppression of women in general, with the idea that different strategies may be needed to oppose each. On a radical feminist understanding of sexism, however, lesbian oppression is a very important part of the oppression of females generally. Women's liberation requires opposition to lesbian oppression. Or so I argue in supporting radicalesbianfeminism as a unified theory.

I support Cheshire Calhoun's argument that there is a distinctive type of sexuality injustice addressed to lesbians and gays, but challenge her definitional strategy regarding the concepts of “lesbian” and “gay” and the “universalistic essentialist” distinction that she draws between patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. Finally, I take issue with the political implications of her claim that lesbians’ and gays’ special oppression stems from our exclusion from the legal prerogatives of marriage and parenthood.

In response to Ann Ferguson and Claudia Card, I argue that Gayle Rubin's analysis of sex-gender systems supports the hypothesis that heterosexual domination is a distinctive axis of oppression. While gender domination places women in disad-vantaged positions, heterosexual domination displaces lesbians and gay men from society. In response to Chris Cuomo, I argue that same-sex desire is part of lesbians’ gender ambiguity; but I agree that nvy work has underemphasized sexual desire.

This paper was presented at the XIX World Congress of Philosophy, “Mankind at a Turning Point: Philosophical Perspectives” held in Moscow, August 22-28, 1993. The author, representing the International Association of Women Philosophers, criticizes the use of “Mankind” in the Congress title and incorporates a resolution, subsequently passed unanimously by the steering committee of the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophic, that calls for the use of non-sexist language at future World Congresses.