This essay examines the contradictions often found in third wave feminist texts that function as strategic choices that may shape, foster, and enhance an individual's sense of agency. Many third wave feminists utilize contradiction as a way to understand emergent identities, to develop new ways of thinking, and to imagine new forms of social action. Agency, then, stems from the use of contradiction as a means of self-determination and identity, of transcendence of seemingly forced or dichotomous choices, and counter-imaginations of a better future.

In “Rethinking Sadomasochism,” Patrick Hopkins challenges the “radical” feminist claim that sadomasochism is incompatible with feminism. He does so by appeal to the notion of “simulation.” I argue that Hopkins's conclusions are generally right, but they cannot be inferred from his “simulation” argument. I replace Hopkins's “simulation” with Kendall Walton's more sophisticated theory of “make-believe.” I use this theory to better argue that privately conducted sadomasochism is compatible with feminism.

Simone de Beauvoir incorporates a significantly altered form of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic into The Ethics of Ambiguity. Her ethical theory explains and denounces extreme wrongdoing, such as the mass murder of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis. This essay demonstrates that, in the Beauvoirean dialectic, the Nazi value system (and Hitler) was the master, Adolf Eichmann was a slave, and Jews were denied human status. The analysis counters Robin May Schott's claims that “Beauvoir portrays the attitudes of the oppressor as defined fundamentally in relation to the oppressed” and that her use of the dialectic is “inadequate to account for how human beings create extreme situations of evil, such as that of genocide.”

I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences.

Some feminists have argued that the “master's tools” cannot be utilized for feminist projects. When read through the lens of non-ideal theory, Judith Butler's reevaluation of “autonomy” and “universality” and Peaches's engagement with guitar rock are instances in which implements of patriarchy are productively repurposed for feminist ends. These examples evince two criteria whereby one can judge the success of such an attempt: first, accessibility and efficacy; second, that the use is deconstructive of its own conditions.

This paper is a philosophical reconstruction of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's thinking about women and feminism, and an inquiry into whether there is a conservative form of feminism. The paper argues that Fox-Genovese's endorsement of conventional social forms (like traditional marriage, motherhood, and sexual morality) contrasts strongly with feminism's criticism of these forms, and feminism's claim that they should be transformed. The paper concludes, however, that one need not call Fox-Genovese's thought “feminist” to recognize it as serious advocacy on behalf of women and to include it in discussions about what is good for women.

This paper examines two different ways of understanding the concept of bodily integrity and their political implications. In Drucilla Cornell's use of the concept, the body cannot be separated from the mind. Protecting bodily integrity means protecting possibilities of imagining the self as whole. Martha Nussbaum's theorizing is based on a liberal way of conceptualizing subjectivity, in which the mind and the body are separate, and bodily integrity is used to refer to physical inviolability.

This paper explores the gendered and temporal dimensions of the political ontology of hospitality that Derrida has developed from Levinas's philosophy. The claim is that, while hospitality per se takes time, the more that hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time it takes is given by women without acknowledgment or support. The analysis revisits Hannah Arendt's claim that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is disclosure of “natality” (innovation or the birth of the new). This can be described as accounting for the “temporalisation of time”: the disruption of the past (cultural tradition) in the present that is a condition of agency and political hospitality. On the other hand, the unpredictability and instability of human affairs that this temporalization of time engenders can, in times of heightened insecurity and fear, give birth to political conservatism that would contain “natality” and dampen the hospitality that characterizes democratic pluralism. The paper examines the connection between this idea of the temporalization of time and feminist observations, overlooked by Arendt, that “lived time” is gendered, that is, that the condition of “natality” and political hospitality is an unacknowledged stability provided by women giving lived time to others, beginning with reproduction in the “home.” The inequities that result are exacerbated, and democracy is further compromised, if this re-gendering of domestic space is accompanied by the deregularization of labor time.

Recent research on women philosophers has led to more discussion of the merits of many previously forgotten women in the past several years. Yet due to the fact that a thinker's significance and influence are historical phenomena, women remain relatively absent in “mainstream” discussions of philosophy. This paper focuses on several successful academic women in American philosophy and takes notice of how they succeeded in their own era. Special attention is given to three important academic women philosophers: Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies.

In philosophical circles, Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630–1714) is known mainly as the friend, patron, and correspondent of Leibniz. While many scholars acknowledge Sophie's interest in philosophy, some also claim that Sophie dabbled in philosophy herself, but did not do so either seriously or competently. In this paper I show that such a view is incorrect, and that Sophie did make interesting philosophical contributions of her own, principally concerning the nature of mind and thought.