The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan is justly renowned as a powerful visual advertisement for his political philosophy. Consequently, its rich imagery has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary. Surprisingly, then, its gendered dimensions have received relatively limited attention. This essay explores this neglected facet of the frontispiece. I argue that the image initially appears to present a hypermasculine sovereign. However, upon closer inspection, and considered alongside Hobbes's economic theory, it yields to a reading of the sovereign as an ambiguously gendered figure. Reading the frontispiece through the prism of gender and the economy reveals not a static image of unwavering male power but rather one of an equivocally-sexed creature teeming with life, contradictions, and complexities worthy of continued examination.

Nancy J. Hirschmann presents a feminist, social constructionist account of women's freedom. Friedman's discussion of Hirschmanns account deals with (1) some conceptual problems facing a thoroughgoing social constructionism; (2) three ways to modify social constructionism to avoid those problems; and (3) an assessment of Hirschmann's version of social constructionism in light of the previous discussion.

This article attempts to reconcile Sandra Harding's postmodernist standpoint theory with process reliabilism in first-order epistemology and naturalism in metaepistemology. Postmodernist standpoint theory is best understood as consisting of an applied epistemological component and a metaepistemological component. Naturalist metaepistemology and the metaepistemological component of postmodernist standpoint theory have produced complementary views of knowledge as a socially and naturally located phenomenon and have converged on a common concept of objectivity. The applied epistemological claims of postmodernist standpoint theory usefully can be construed as applications of process reliabilist first-order epistemology. Postmodernist standpoint theory, reliabilism, and naturalism thus form a coherent package of views in metaepistemology, first-order epistemology, and applied epistemology.

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self-value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self-perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love.

Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex identifies the philosophical vantage point from which she will survey the situation of women as existentialist. The ways in which she must later compromise that committment to theory in order to remain true to her feminist insights foreshadow recent developments in feminist ethics and epistemology.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been heralded as a canonical text of feminist theory. The book focuses on providing an account of the lived experience of woman that generates a condition of otherness. However, I contend that it falls short of being able to account for the multidimensionality of identity insofar as Beauvoir's argument rests upon the comparison between racial and gendered oppression that is understood through the black–white binary. The result of this framework is the imperceptibility of identities at the crossroads between categories of race and gender. Hence, the goal of this article is to explore the margins of Beauvoir's work in order to decenter the “other” of The Second Sex and make known what is made imperceptible by its architecture, using Latina identity as an interventional guide. I conclude that given the prominence of The Second Sex in feminist theory, this shortcoming must be addressed if feminist theorists are to use it responsibly.

As part of a celebration of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family (JGF), this article notes how some impacts of the book were so accepted that their original source (JGF) has been forgotten. It goes on to make three critical arguments about 1) Okin's pared‐down account of gender injustice, 2) her choice to embrace the Rawlsian distributive view of justice, and 3) her treatment of the family as the linchpin of gender injustice.

Silencing is a speech‐related harm. We here focus on one particular account of silencing offered by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton. According to this account, silencing is systematically generated, illocutionary‐communicative failure (of a very specific sort). We here raise an apparent challenge to that account. In particular, we offer an example—the drowning case—that meets these conditions of silencing but does not intuitively seem to be an instance of it. First, we explore several conditions one might add to the Hornsby‐Langton account, but we argue that none are satisfactory. Then, we further explore the systematicity condition, which is insufficiently characterized in the current literature. Although we explore several promising ways to further characterize this condition, we ultimately conclude that more work needs to be done. Consequently, because this systematicity condition is under‐specified, the Hornsby‐Langton account of silencing is incomplete.

This essay begins to develop a philosophical interpretation of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale, a work of fiction that is known in English as The Neapolitan Novels. My ultimate aim is to explore the work's ambitious moral psychology, and particularly its subtle conceptualization of women's path to freedom. I begin by reconstructing some of the main ideas of Italian difference feminism as they are expressed in the texts of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective—texts that are controversial milestones of Italian social theory, yet are relatively unknown outside of Italy. I then show how these ideas provide a useful frame of reference for interpreters of Ferrante's novel. This discussion sets up a more extended analysis (in part 2 of this essay) of the special status of Lila Cerullo, her strange condition of smarginatura (“dissolving boundaries”), and the import of her puzzling earthquake speech.

Luce Irigaray's provocative vision of eros is often expressed in what Elizabeth Grosz calls “rambling and apparently disconnected” language, and nowhere in Irigaray's texts is it presented as a coherent account. With the goal of elaborating the significance of Irigaray's vision, I here set out to construct such an account. After first defining the Irigarayan erotic encounter as a paradoxical conjunction of “separation and alliance,” I then aim to show that its structure may be productively interpreted in terms of six co-present modes: (i) wonder, the affective mode; (ii) touch, the sensuous mode; (iii) transgression, the subjective mode; (iv) fluidity, the elemental mode; (v) future, the temporal mode; and (vi) threeness, the numerical mode. From this interpretation, I argue, there emerges a new understanding of the immense power of Irigarayan eros as a “sexual or carnal ethics” and as a constitutive force not only for embodied subjectivity and intersubjectivity but also for sexual difference itself.

I argue that the experimental method, like the corporeality of the body and the permeability of skins, links John Dewey and Friedrich Nietzsche. I raise questions about referring to bodies rather than body-minds, emphasizing hypothetical construction and the body rather than mutual responsiveness and situatedness, and whether Nietzsche's elitism is comparable to Dewey's democratic ideal of inclusiveness. With Naomi Zack, I argue for substituting ethnicity for race, and also develop Jane Addams as a model for recognizing and dismantling privilege.

Sites of embodied disruption challenge academics to engage with power at its seams. In this article I consider an ethics of embodiment, situating it within questions raised by Judith Butler in her articles, “Doing Justice to Someone” (Butler 2001a) and “Giving an Account of Oneself” (Butler 2001b). In “Giving an Account,” Butler claims that gaps in knowledge and representation are germane to ethical practice, that brave inadequacies and creative approximations are the best we can do for others and ourselves. In “Doing Justice,” Butler enacts this stance, recounting the story of David Reimer, a child who in 1965 was offered up to science after his penis was severed in a botched circumcision. She seizes upon, through narrative fragments, a body whose sexual indeterminacy became the site and occasion for particularly brutal regimes of interpretation. Butler situates this patchwork narrative within the academic industry that reappropriates David's story for its own purposes. Taking Butler's ideas to heart, I carefully trace the nuances of her argument and highlight the (necessary) silences and foreclosures of her account. I propose “seamfulness” as a possible ethical‐aesthetic strategy for embodying Butler's ethical concerns. I close by briefly introducing some implications for arts‐informed representations in academic work.

I am concerned that, in our quest to end discrimination, we as feminists may be concentrating too much on equality and ignoring more basic issues of social justice. I argue that we must not lose sight of where we as a society are going in the effort to make sure we all get there together. The primary goal, after all, is not simply for women to get what men have, but justice for all.

Contemporary feminist interest in the persistent underrepresentation of women in top professions suggests an implicit approval of the competition required to achieve these posts. Competition, however, seems to be in tension with feminist opposition to domination and oppression. This paper outlines the dimensions of this tension and examines three attempts to resolve the incompatibility. The first two try to separate the undesirable elements of competition from the positive by way of the competitiveness/competition and the challenge/scarcity distinctions. I argue that these distinctions fail to alleviate worries about competition, particularly in the context of the professions. Meanwhile, the third reconciliatory attempt offers a pragmatic argument for compatibilism based on the value of women's participation in the professions (and their associated competitions). Although this pragmatic argument has some merit, I argue that it significantly overestimates the amount of competition acceptable for feminist participation. The end result is that, within the context of the professions, competition remains fundamentally in tension with feminism.

Aanerud's project is to develop an account of white antiracist mothering, using a model of maternal duty to raise antiracist white children. The author sets this project in the context of historic constructions of white mothering in the twentieth century and then contrasts the need for an exploration of white mothers raising white children against the literature of white mothers’ raising children of color and mothers of color raising their own children, Once this distinction is made, Aanerud uses Collins's account of racial ethnic mothering as a springboard into her discussion of antiracist white mothering of white children.

Theoretically, feminists ought to be the best deliberative democrats. However, political commitments (which this author shares) to inclusiveness on issues of reproductive health and gay and lesbian rights, for example, create a boundary within feminism between those committed to the “feminist consensus” on these issues and women activists who share some feminist commitments, but not all. This article offers theoretically and empirically informed suggestions for how feminists can foster inclusive deliberation within feminist spaces.