What if it doesn't get better? Against more hopeful and optimistic views that it is not just ideal but possible to put an end to what John Rawls calls “the great evils of human history,” I aver that when it comes to evils caused by human beings, the situation is hopeless. We are better off with the heavy knowledge that evils recur than we are with idealizations of progress, perfection, and completeness; an appropriate ethic for living with such heavy knowledge could include resisting evils, improving the lives of victims, and even enjoying ourselves. Better conceptions of the objects of hope, and the good life, inform a praxis‐centered, nonideal, feminist ethic, supportive of sustained moral motivation, resilience, and even cheer. I connect elements of stoic and pessimistic philosophy in order to outline some normative recommendations for living with evils. A praxis‐centered ethic would helpfully adjust our expectations from changing an uncontrollable future to developing better skills for living in a world that exceeds our control. As Aldo Leopold once said, “That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”

This article explores how Julia Kristeva's construction of a fictional narrative space enables her to examine the conditions that can produce a culture of revolt. Focusing on one of her novels, The Old Man and the Wolves, the article brings together Hannah Arendt's political philosophy (which provides a framework for Kristeva's depiction of totalitarianism) with Duns Scotus's principle of individuation and Giorgio Agamben's notion of quodlibet (“whatever singularity”) to argue that the future of a culture of revolt is closely connected to the role of women. By aligning feminine thought to political revolt, I demonstrate that Kristeva's revalorization of feminine experiences in the novel constitutes the basis of an ethics that includes the recognition of “whatever” forms of life that have been historically neglected.

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held.

I expand upon Kristie Dotson's concept of “epistemic violence” by identifying another type of epistemic violence that arises in the context of nonverbal communication. “Emotional misperception,” as I call it, occurs when the following conditions are met: (1) A misreads B's nonlinguistic expression of emotion, (2) owing to reliable ignorance, (3) harming B.

Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist uses.

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly.

Countering hegemonic understandings of rage as a deleterious emotion, this article examines rage across specific sites of trans cultural production—the prison letters of CeCe McDonald and the durational performance art of Cassils—in order to argue that it is integral to trans survival and flourishing. Theorizing rage as a justified response to unlivable circumstances, a response that plays a key role in enabling trans subjects to detach from toxic relational dynamics in order to transition toward other forms of gendered subjectivity and intimate communality, I develop an account of what I call an “infrapolitical ethics of care” that indexes a web of communal practices that empathetically witness and amplify rage, as well as support subjects during and after moments of grappling with overwhelming negative affect. I draw on the work of trans, queer, and feminist theorists who have theorized the productivities of so‐called “negative” affects, particularly Sara Ahmed's work on willfulness and killing joy (2014), María Lugones's writing on anger (2003), Judith Butler's Spinozan reassessment of the vexed relations between self‐preservation and self‐destruction (2015), and the rich account of trans rage provided by Susan Stryker (1994).

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual difference. This article examines the uses of transsexuality throughout Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimorphic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender.