Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

We criticize the following views: only the rapist is responsible since only he committed the act; no one is responsible since rape is a biological response to stimuli; everyone is responsible since men and women contribute to the rape culture; and patriarchy is responsible but no person or group. We then argue that, in some societies, men are collectively responsible for rape since most benefit from rape and most are similar to the rapist.

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the “mainstreaming” of intersectionality in (white‐dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now‐famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how—by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of “race” and “sex” tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness—antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of “intersectionality” that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio‐legal reproduction of hierarchical power.

Drawing from our interdisciplinary qualitative study of LGBTI conservative Christians and their allies, we name an especially toxic form of shame—what we call sacramental shame—that affects the lives of LGBTI and other conservative Christians. Sacramental shame results from conservative Christianity's allegiance to the doctrine of gender complementarity, which elevates heteronormativity to the level of the sacred and renders those who violate it as not persons, but monsters. In dispensing shame as a sacrament, nonaffirming Christians require constant displays of shame as proof that LGBTI church members love God and belong in the community. Part of what makes this shame so harmful is that parents and pastors often dispense it with sincere expressions of care and affection, compounding the sense that one's capacity to give and receive love is damaged. We foreground LGBTI Christian movements to overcome sacramental shame by cultivating nonhubristic pride, and conclude by discussing briefly their new understandings of love and justice that could have far‐reaching benefits.

Feminist peace theories that find hope for peace in the ideal of the caretaking woman are grounded in patriarchal gender distinctions, fail to challenge adequately the patriarchal dualism that constitutes the self by devaluing the other, and the practice of caretaking about which they speak may be easily co-opted into the service of war. Feminist peace theory should address the devaluation of “others,” in order to undermine this justification and motivation for war.

This essay discusses a cluster of problems for feminist theory and practice which concern responsibility and choice under conditions of oppression. I characterize four major perspectives from which situations of oppression or victimization can be seen and questions about choice and responsibility answered: The Perspective of the Oppressor; The Perspective of the Victim; The Perspective of the Responsible Actor; and The Perspective of the Observer/Philosopher. 1 compare their strengths and weaknesses and discuss their compatibility.

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation.

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives.

Because “rape” has such a powerful appraisive meaning, how one defines the term has normative significance. Those who define rape rigidly so as to exclude contemporary feminist understandings are therefore seeking to silence some moral perspectives “by definition.” I argue that understanding rape as an essentially contested concept allows the concept sufficient flexibility to permit open moral discourse, while at the same time preserving a core meaning that can frame the discourse.

This essay examines the possible systematic bias against the disabled in the structure and practice of genetic counseling. Finding that the profession's “nondirective” imperative remains problematic, the authors recommend that methodology developed by feminist standpoint epistemology be used to incorporate the perspective of disabled individuals in genetic counselors' education and practice, thereby reforming society's view of the disabled and preventing possible negative effects of genetic counseling on the self-concept and material circumstance of disabled individuals.

I bring several ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology to bear on mainstream animal rights theories, especially on the rights and utilitarian treatments of the animal research issue. Throughout, I show how animal rights issues are feminist issues and clarify the relationship between ecofeminism and animal rights.

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel's notion of the natural attitude about sex and his claim that it is fundamentally moral in nature. The author looks beneath the natural attitude in order to explain its peculiar resilience and oppressive force. There she reveals a moral order grounded in the dichotomously sexed bodies so constituted through boundaries governing privacy and decency. In particular, naked bodies are sex‐differentiated within a system of genital representation through gender presentation—a system that helps constitute the very boundaries between the public and private.

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau‐Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of “grip” is a signal of impending loss, and is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure‐footed mastery. I read Merleau‐Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise.

Gay marriage highlights a contradiction in American national identity: if gay marriage is supported, the normative status of the heterosexual nuclear family is undermined, while if not, the civil rights of homosexuals are undermined. This essay discusses the feminist dilemma of whether to support gay marriage to promote these individual civil rights or whether to critique marriage as a part of the patriarchal system that oppresses women.

This essay introduces some of the many interests, methodologies, and goals that the philosophical tradition of classical American philosophy, usually referred to as pragmatism, shares with feminist theories. Because pragmatism developed along with the emergence of departments of philosophy in the United States, it also begins recovering the shared history of some of the first women to receive philosophy degrees. It claims that women in and out of the academy influenced pragmatism and shows how contemporary feminist philosophers continue to challenge and appropriate it.

This paper argues that trans and genderqueer people affect the gender formation and identity of non-trans people. We explore three instances of this relationship between trans and non-trans genders: an allegiance to inadequate liberal-individualist models of selfhood; tropes through which trans people are made to stand as theoretical objects with which to think about gender broadly; and a narrow focus on gender and evasion of an intersectional understanding of gender formation.

This paper discusses the question whether care work for dependent persons (children, the elderly, and disabled persons) may be entrusted to the market; that is, whether and to what extent there is a normative justification for the “commodification of care.” It first proposes a capability theory for care that raises two relevant demands: a basic capability for receiving care and a capability for giving care. Next it discusses and rejects two objections that aim to show that market-based care undermines the caring motives essential to care, one of them because of its reliance on contracts and the other because of the corrupting influence of payment on motivation. If market care is in principle legitimate, the commodification question transforms into one about the appropriate combinations of market and non-market care. This question can be answered only by adding an additional complication: care is to be balanced against other activities, most notably work for the labor market. This brings in the problem of gender inequality, since paid work has been traditionally distributed to men and caring activities to women. I show how the capability theory of caring presented in this paper can help resolve the dispute between competing models for balancing work and caring.

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the emergence of “problematic of alien sexuality.” I first locate discourses about “alien sexuality,” and the so‐called anchor baby in particular, within other national discourses surrounding maternity, the fetus, and citizenship. I analyze the ways that national political discourses surrounding “anchor babies” and “alien maternity” construct the “problematic of alien sexuality,” thus constituting the “alien” subject as always‐already perverse. I suggest that this production of a sexually deviant and threatening “alien” subject functions in the normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen on the one hand, and the perverse anticitizen on the other, in what I call “backwards uncitizening.” My analysis of this process shows that the perverse “alien” subject, as constituted in significant part by nonjuridical normalizing mechanisms of biopower, resists the juridical discourse that is supposed to determine it.

This article develops a new approach for theorizing about hermeneutical injustice. According to a dominant view, hermeneutical injustice results from a hermeneutical gap: one lacks the conceptual tools needed to make sense of, or to communicate, important social experiences, where this lack is a result of an injustice in the background social methods used to determine hermeneutical resources. I argue that this approach is incomplete. It fails to capture an important species of hermeneutical injustice which doesn't result from a lack of hermeneutical resources, but from the overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts which function to crowd-out, defeat, or pre-empt the application of a more accurate hermeneutical resource. I propose a broader analysis that better respects the dynamic relationship between hermeneutical resources and the social and political contexts in which they are implemented.