In this article I think through Black feminism and queer theory to critically analyze toxicology. I focus on toxicology's conception of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), a class of toxicants that can cause epigenetic changes leading to inheritable health issues. I suggest that Black feminist interventions are particularly necessary for the study of toxicants because multiply marginalized populations are disproportionately more exposed to EDCs. The structural preconditions that generate this uneven, racialized, and sexualized toxic body-burden threaten to turn cultural constructions of race and sex (epistemologies) into biological realities (ontologies). My discursive analysis of key scientific texts on toxicology, EDCs, and epigenetics underscores how Eurocentric biases and eugenic logics permeate and co-constitute biochemical matter. I further argue that these texts’ un/articulated norms regarding the human, sexual behavior, and evolutionary fitness undermine the usefulness of toxicological assessments for environmental justice. I close by urging scientist scholar-activists to reconceive the study of toxicants. A Black feminist approach to toxicity, I suggest, would not only situate chemical exposures in their sociopolitical contexts, but also radically revision what it means to be human.

In 2017, the artist Dana Schutz presented her painting, Open Casket, at the Whitney Biennial. Both the painting and the painter were subsequently subjected to criticism from the art world. A central critique was that Schutz usurped the story of Emmett Till (the subject of Open Casket) and that, as a white woman, she had no right to do so. Much can—and has—been said on the appropriateness of Schutz's painting. In this article, I argue that Open Casket is a site of oppression, an object that both reflects and reinforces dominant racial hierarchies. Specifically, I argue that Open Casket is a case of what Linda Alcoff calls “the problem of speaking for others”: when a member of a privileged social group speaks on the social experiences of an oppressed group, effectively silencing that group. I explore the moral and epistemic implications of Open Casket and related works and provide some reasons to think that socially privileged persons should not depict the experiences of socially oppressed persons—at least in many cases. I conclude by presenting some conditions under which it may be appropriate for privileged artists to speak for oppressed groups.

This article examines two early modern feminist works, Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739) and Woman's Superior Excellence Over Man (1740), written by “Sophia, A Person of Quality.” Scholars once dismissed these texts as plagiarisms or semi-translations of François Poulain de la Barre's De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673). More recently, however, Guyonne Leduc has drawn attention to the original aspects of these treatises by highlighting Sophia's significant variations on Poulain's vocabulary (Leduc 2010; 2012; 2015). In this article, I take Leduc's analysis a step further by demonstrating that Sophia's variations amount to unique and distinctive arguments for the restoration of women's rights, based on both the natural equality and the moral superiority of women compared to men. I argue that Sophia goes beyond Poulain's Cartesian insights to mount a critique of male tyranny characterized as a lack of generosity toward women. My contention is that Sophia's texts represent a culmination in a line of reasoning that extends from the querelle des femmes of the Renaissance to Poulain's Cartesian feminism of the seventeenth century, through to arguments for women's rights in the eighteenth century. Her works thus warrant greater recognition as significant turning points in the history of feminist thought.

Discussions about nineteenth-century African American ethnology tend to focus only on black male thinkers. In the nineteenth century, ethnology was the study of difference among humans and often used racist science to justify discrimination against blacks. Black woman thinker Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) made important contributions to ethnology but remains understudied. I argue that Stewart is a black feminist ethnologist because she aligns herself with her black male interlocutors on the core points of ethnology. Yet Stewart adds a distinctly black feminist position to the conversation. By focusing on Stewart's speech “An Address Delivered to the African Masonic Hall” (1833), I show that she concurs with her contemporaries that black people are inherently great because of their genealogical connection to Africa. Stewart also agrees that the inherent greatness of blacks establishes their claim to sociopolitical rights. I argue that Stewart's call for racial unity makes her a proto-black feminist and is a unique feature of her contribution to African American ethnology. Stewart's call demands that white people be held responsible for the harm that they have caused to blacks, which can be remedied by the races coming together on equal footing.

This article focuses on the pragmatist feminist theories of social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. It begins by delineating Gilman's understanding of how the material-cultural environment affects the lives of women. Believing the American way of life to be too individualistic, Gilman developed a theory of social change aimed at generating more collectivist ways of living and promoting the economic independence of women. To achieve these ends, Gilman advocated for the reconstruction of the Victorian nursery, which she believed would afford women the choice to pursue a professional career outside of the home, and promote the health of the community. Gilman's social theory is contrasted with that of Margaret Mead, who believed that plans for social reform are best left to readers. Rather than advocate for the adoption of an entirely new cultural practice, Mead sought to acquaint her culturally diverse American readership with the Samoan way of life, so that they might collectively decide how to best address the problem of choice facing young women in the 1920s.

Ascribing autonomous status to agents is a valuable practice. As such, we ought to care about how we engage in practices of autonomy ascription. However, disagreement between first-personal experiences of an agent's autonomy and third-personal determinations of their autonomy presents challenges of ethical and epistemic concern. My view is that insights from a dialogical rather than nondialogical account of autonomy give us the resources to combat the challenges associated with autonomy ascription. I draw on Andrea Westlund's account of dialogical autonomy—on which autonomy requires a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external critical perspectives—to make my case.

Part 1 of this essay began to develop a philosophical interpretation of The Neapolitan Novels by grounding a vision of the work's moral psychology in the tradition of Italian difference feminism, particularly as it is expressed in the texts of the influential Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. Part 2 advances the interpretive argument by presenting a more detailed literary analysis of the character of Lila Cerullo. After motivating the interest of various aspects of her symbolization by connecting them to important motifs in feminist philosophy and literature, I present evidence of Lila's special status in the work, and the puzzles this status raises. I advance a reading of Lila as a brilliant woman capable of playing the superior role in a hierarchical relationship of entrustment—and of The Neapolitan Novels as a sympathetic yet critical exploration of the viability of such relationships and their connection to female friendship and female freedom. In support of this reading, I give an account of Lila's strange condition of smarginatura (“dissolving margins/boundaries”), the import of her perplexing earthquake speech in which this condition is explicitly addressed, and Elena Greco's troubling reactions.

Conservation scholarship and policies are concerned with the viability of idealized ecological communities constructed using human metrics. We argue that the discipline of conservation assumes an epistemology and ethics of human sovereignty/dominion over animals that leads to violent actions against animals. We substantiate our argument by deconstructing a case study. In the context of recent bushfires in Australia, we examine recent legislation passed by the parliament of New South Wales (NSW), policy documents, and academic articles by conservationists that support breaking communities of horses and/or killing 4,000 horses in Kosciuszko National Park (KNP), NSW. Theoretically framing our deconstruction against human sovereignty over animals and anthropocentrism, we affirm an intersectional, ecofeminist approach that values animals as relational and vulnerable agents. We uncover first the epistemic violence of categorizing horses as “pests,” and the anthropocentric nature of recently passed legislation in NSW. We analyze next the deficient ethics of NSW's government, and the argument that killing animals is justifiable when they suffer from starvation and dehydration. We close with a realistic proposal that does not involve breaking horses’ communities and/or killing horses, and a plea to the government of NSW and conservationists not to harm any horses in KNP.

Sally Haslanger (b. 1955) is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading contemporary feminist philosopher. She has worked on analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and ancient philosophy. Her areas of interest are social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Her 2012 book, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, collects papers published over the course of twenty years that link work in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language with social and political issues concerning gender, race, and the family. It was awarded the 2014 Joseph B. Gittler Prize for “outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences.” In this interview, done in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we discuss her ideas on social practices, social structure, and structural explanation. We also delve into her debunking project of elucidating the notion of ideology in a way that links it with contemporary work in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, and to do justice to the materiality of social practices and social structures.

Whether it be in universities’ curricula or in traditional accounts of the history of philosophy, early modern women philosophers have frequently been treated as secondary, inconsequential characters. Although many valuable efforts are being made to counter this state of affairs, a generalized tendency to focus on well-known male philosophers and to establish them as representative figures of the early modern period still seems to exist. But does this strategy produce an accurate historical account of early modern philosophy? This essay explores diverse causes of the exclusion of early modern women philosophers from the canon, reflecting on the historical and political aspects of this phenomenon. This piece also intends to highlight the importance of the innovative projects that have been recently created in the field of the digital humanities, which aim to mitigate and to counter said exclusion.

I've long been haunted by the image of Cosette, in the film adaptation of Les Misérables, singing from her lavish bedroom about wanting to be free. Her life would have seemed charmed from the outside, especially by those in nineteenth-century France who struggled to stay alive, yet she envied the freedom of those outside her door. She couldn't, of course, know how hard the lives were of those whom she watched, and those she watched would have scoffed at the suggestion that they had it better than she did. I, however, keenly saw and felt her struggle. I've spent my life constructing a cage for myself, with bars built out of societal and familial expectations for women. But inside the cage, I simultaneously long to be free and am afraid to leave. In my desire to appear normal, to fit in, I have constrained myself out of fear of what will happen if I leave this cage. So I watch the world around me, and like Cosette, I wonder what it's like to live outside the walls I've carefully constructed to make it appear as if I'm embodying, or at least trying to, Western societal expectations for what it means to be a woman.

There was a day in March 2020 when I discovered I was old. There had, of course, been quite a few previous intimations of impending old age, but they had not “really” defined my being for me. Some years earlier, I had been surprised when people started to offer me their seat on a crowded bus or train. At first, I politely refused the seat; later, I decided that I would accept such invitations because declining seemed ungracious, and because accepting would encourage this thoughtful behavior from which “others” would benefit. Recently, as my feet have begun to ache more, I have sometimes been happy to accept a seat on my own account. There have been other intimations too: some physical indications, such as needing a brighter light in order to read and stiffness in my knees. There have also been signs that my cultural, intellectual, and professional world, a world in which I have been deeply embedded, is passing: Students now live in an online media world that is alien to me, and a few of my colleagues have made it known that they find my research interests on Simone de Beauvoir a bit old-fashioned (I don't agree with them, of course). But none of this actually defined me for myself as “old.” Surely, still an unremarkable, white, late-middle-aged woman, I did not think I “looked my age.” Surely, I had not yet become a member of that detested “foreign species” (as Beauvoir put it) whose presence lurks within us all and that I, like most of us, so vehemently sought to deny.

Who said manifestos are dead? Some thirty years after the publication of Donna Haraway's illustrious A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1991), fifty years after Valerie Solanas's angry and delightful SCUM Manifesto (Solanas 1967), and 170 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's influential Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848), a new manifesto in town in fact bears traces of all these and then some: The Xenofeminist Manifesto. This manifesto, which comes in a gorgeously designed booklet version as well as in a colorful and nostalgic 80s computer-culture website with nerdy hexadecimal page numbers and related Twitter account, is a work from the “xenofeminist” collective Laboria Cuboniks. The name of this collective, whose members are from various parts of the globe, is actually an anagram of “Nicolas Bourbaki,” a largely French collective of mathematicians in the early 1900s who sought to affirm abstraction, rigor, and generalization (Laboria Cuboniks 2014). Together with a firm foot in cyberfeminism and a strong penchant for the abstract and universal by way of the logic of computing against the arguably flawed universal of “nature,” the manifesto also clearly bears the marks of feminist ecocriticism, new materialism, queer theory, and technological accelerationism. The two books under review bring various activisms and insights together in an original way, and do so clearly with an eye toward reviving the cyberfeminist spirit through, among others, ideas from Shulamith Firestone's Dialectics of Sex (Firestone 1970). This pairing certainly had me excited, since, as I argue elsewhere, I am, together with Haraway's original cyborg manifesto, firmly of the opinion that feminisms of all kinds should intervene in and contribute even more radically to contemporary techno-culture and philosophy of technology. This is because clearly, new media and genetic technologies are at present some of the most powerful techniques by which we live and probably will live in the near future, and because these technologies are intimately interwoven with Eurocentric masculinism, heterosexism, militarism, and capitalism (Hoofd 2016, 225, 229).

This is a particularly important time to be reconsidering and revisiting radical feminism. The contemporary visibility of trans rights movements, and the unsurprising, accompanying backlash from a variety of camps makes this a politically charged and tense moment for reflection on the herstory, present, and future of this school of feminism.