In this essay we investigate several moments in Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical and literary texts in which she refers to echoes and echoing. We notice that echoes help Beauvoir to figure and amplify the ethical character of her concept of ambiguity, which is so central to her thought. We argue that, for Beauvoir, literature has privileged access to the ambiguity of existence and therefore maintains a special status in exposing us to alterity and bringing us face to face with ethical responsibility. Considering her literary portrayals of echoing helps to explain why, despite her life‐long philosophical engagement, Beauvoir preferred not to call herself a philosopher. Finally, Beauvoir's phenomenological insight is that in order to carry ethical resonance, the form of a written work must mirror the fundamentally ambiguous or echolalic ontological structure of human existence.

The Asian American identity is intimately associated with upward class mobility as the model minority, yet women's earnings remain less than men's, and Asian American women are perceived to have strong family ties binding them to domestic responsibilities. As such, the exact class status of Asian American women is unclear. The immediate association of this ethnic identity with a specific class as demonstrated by the recently released Pew study that Asian Americans are “the highest‐income, best‐educated” ethnicity contrasts with another study that finds Asian American women have the highest suicide rates in the United States. To understand these contrasting statistics, this article explores Asian American women's sense of authenticity. If the individual's sense of authenticity is intimately related with one's group identity, the association of the Asian American identity with a particular class ambivalently ensnares her as dichotomously inauthentic—as both the poor Asian American woman who fails to achieve economic upward mobility and the model minority Asian American woman who engages in assimilation practices. Feminist philosophers understand that identities change, but exactly how these transformations occur remains a mystery. The article ends with three speculations on the difficulties for practicing and recognizing individual acts that transform one's group identity.

Reading Hegel's 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion alongside his Phenomenology of Spirit, I argue that his vision for becoming a self-conscious subject—or seeing (oneself as) “spirit”—requires taking responsibility for the insight that every act of reason expresses an experience of sexual difference. It entails working to bring into being communities whose conceptions of gender and the absolute realize this idea.

Philosophical anarchists have made their living criticizing theories of state legitimacy and the duty to obey the law. The most prominent theories of state legitimacy have been called into doubt by the anarchists' insistence that citizens' lack of consent to the state renders the whole justificatory enterprise futile. Autonomy requires consent, they argue, and justification must respect autonomy. In this essay, I want to call into question the weight of consent in protecting our capacity for autonomy. I argue that if we care about all of the preconditions for autonomy, then we have good reasons to leave the state of nature. This leaves the philosophical anarchist with a dilemma. If she truly cares about autonomy, then she must welcome the state. But if she wants to deny the legitimacy of the state because of the value of consent, then she needs to downplay the moral significance of autonomy in people's lives. If autonomy matters, the state does too. If it doesn't, then consent doesn't. The philosophical anarchist can't have it both ways.

This article reviews three recent books that enhance our understanding of the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader (both by Irigaray), and Philosophy in the Feminine, a commentary on Irigaray's work by Margaret Whitford. The author emphasizes a dynamic reading of Irigaray's philosophy and integrates theoretical concepts with poetic/utopian passages from the works.

In this article I discuss the argument/criticismi'concerns of bisexuality that arise from within progressive communities which already accept gay and lesbian rights. Issues discussed include trust, heterosexuality and the body, the power dynamics of patriarchal oppression and subjective verification. The moon is evoked as a material metaphor for phases and changes. 1 argue that conditions of the world preclude political attachment to an excessively fixed standard of many things, including sexual orientation.

In this response to Kathleen Martindale and Martha Saunders's “Realizing Love and Justice: Lesbian Ethics in the Upper and Lower Case,” which appeared in Hypatia 7(4), I argue that a worldly separatism depends upon taking attention from those in positions of dominance and redirecting it to members of nondominant groups, as apolitical, worldly act of resistance.

Focusing on a textbook controversy that emerged in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, Mason explores the discursive production of white ethnicity in the rhetorical, visual, and political strategies used during an organized protest against the new multicultural curriculum adopted by the local school board. What the author finds puzzling is the ways in which these productions of “soul” and “nation” enabled unlikely political alliances between national conservative elites and the local, historically left-leaning working class protesters. The author argues that “soul” is reproduced through racialized discourse signifying the spiritual and ethnic purity of whiteness, the consolidation of white ethnicity, and the spirit of white resistance, articulated through campaigns to save children from future captivity in an “alien” world. Through this on-site theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates how a right-wing narrative of victimhood facilitates the reproduction of ethnic identification among the protesters, whose whiteness apparently can be jeopardized by reading the “wrong” books.

This essay considers whether liberal political theory has tools with which to count gender, and so gender relations, as political. Can liberal political theory count sub-ordination among the harms of sex inequality that the state ought to correct? Watson defends a version of deliberative democracy—liberalism—as able to place issues of social inequality in the form of hierarchical social identities at the center of its normative commitments, and so at the center of securing justice.

This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the “good life.” I begin with the claim that in the post-mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a society centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities—labor, work, action—with respect to the question of justice between the genders.

In this article, I explore a new reason in favor of precollegiate philosophy: It could help narrow the persistent gender disparity within the discipline. I catalog some of the most widely endorsed explanations for the underrepresentation of women in philosophy and argue that, on each hypothesized explanation, precollegiate philosophy instruction could help improve our discipline's gender balance. Explanations I consider include stereotype threat, gendered philosophical intuitions, inhospitable disciplinary environment, lack of same‐sex role models for women students in philosophy, and conflicting “schemas” for philosophy and femininity. I argue that, insofar as some combination of these hypothesized explanations accounts for some portion of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy, those of us concerned to make things better have reason to participate in and promote efforts to share philosophy with younger students.

This paper theorizes and defends a process I term “hermeneutical bastardization.” This concept tracks the way in which some hermeneutical injustices arise not from a gap in a shared pool of hermeneutical resources, but from the decontextualization of an advantageous hermeneutical resource into another (typically dominant) hermeneutical domain. This decontextualization bastardizes hermeneutical resources by severing the concept from its original meaning and significance. I focus on the term “trans woman” and examine the way in which dominant epistemic agents rewrite and redefine the concept according to prominent and prevalent pernicious representations. Specifically, once decontextualized, the term “trans woman” denotes an individual who is thoroughly erotic and sexual in nature. Hermeneutical bastardization can illuminate how hermeneutically marginalized groups are reconstructed by other dominant epistemic agents according to these pernicious representations and can be silenced whilst their concepts, or rather their terms, are being utilized in sets of dominant hermeneutical resources in ways that severely diverge from their original intra-communal conceptualization. This type of hermeneutical injustice does not arise from a lacuna in our set of resources, but instead depends on the uptake of a concept's term and its subsequent decontextualization.

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity.

Anna Doyle Wheeler was a nineteenth‐century, Irish‐born socialist and feminist. She and another Irish‐born socialist and feminist, William Thompson, produced a book‐length critique in 1825, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government,” to refute the claims of liberal philosopher James Mill in 1820 that women did not need to be enfranchised. In so doing the Appeal undermined the philosophical credibility of Mill's liberal utilitarianism. The Appeal exposed the hypocrisy of the language of contract (whether social, sexual, or marriage) by showing that men's freedom and claims to rights presupposed the unfreedom and sexual subjugation of women. The article argues that the Appeal was an original formulation of feminist political theory that still retains its relevance in the twenty‐first century.

In this interview with Kathryn Sophia Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines), Edward O'Byrn discusses Belle's publications from 2010–2017. His questions focus on Simone de Beauvoir and her use of analogy in The Second Sex, along with broader questions that engage Belle's work on existential philosophy, Beauvoir, Black feminism, and intersectionality.

Feminist epistemology aims to propose epistemic reasons for increasing the representation of women or socially subordinated people in science. This is typically done—albeit often only implicitly—by positing a causal mechanism through which the representation of sociodemographic minorities exerts a positive effect on scientific advancement. Two types of causal theories can be identified. The “epistemic diversity thesis” presents a causal path from sociodemographic diversity to scientific progress mediated by epistemic diversity. The “thesis of epistemic advantage” proposes a causal path from social subjugation to capacity for inquiry. The latter theory is defined with substantial ambiguity in the existing literature, and I present an explicit causal reformulation that disambiguates it. The epistemic diversity thesis focuses on the effect of group composition on collective epistemic performance and is largely silent about what kind of characteristics lead to individual epistemic excellence. On the other hand, the thesis of epistemic advantage seeks to identify sociodemographic background conditions that make certain epistemic agents strictly better knowers or inquirers than others and pays little attention to the synergistic effects of diverse group composition. Such a difference in the causal structure reflects the diverging political characteristics of the two theories.

The concept of matricide theorizes the marginal position of the mother within a phallocentric and patriarchal society from a psychoanalytic perspective. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of transformative nonmatricidal processes by analyzing the relations between the psychic and political aspects of these processes. We argue that nonmatricidal spaces can be created through the mobilization of a maternal affect as a care practice that transgresses social and normative boundaries. By reading the biblical story of Moses's birth and childhood, we depict the emergence of a nonmatricidal space and the ways in which this space defies and disturbs social boundaries forced by a heteronormative, phallocentric, and patriarchal law. We draw on Luce Irigaray's and Kelly Oliver's concept of a “loving look” to theorize how maternal affect is mobilized as an ethical and a political commitment, which affirms alternative positions of subjectivity and agency. We conclude by arguing that an integrated account of nonmatricidal relational spaces and maternal radical care practices might offer a wider understanding of the political effects of maternal politics as radical care practices.

Research into war rape has shown that rape is not incidental to the general violence of war but is instead an integral part of war strategies. Such research makes it clear that in the context of war, rape serves to injure women on an individual level, but has the more strategic effect of fracturing communal bonds. Similarly, the growing body of research investigating the reasons for, and consequences of, the rape of lesbian women, indicates that these rapes have far-reaching consequences for lesbian communities and serves to reinforce patriarchal heteronormativity. While there is much research around both war and lesbo-phobic rape, the aim of this paper is to bring this research together in order examine lesbo-phobic rape through the lens of war rape theory. This paper aims to show how both “forms” of rape appear to hinge on the meanings assigned to women during peacetime and how both lead to the destruction of individual victims and their communities, while bolstering the subjectivities of the perpetrators and increasing the bonds of those complicit in such violence. The use of the theoretical understandings of war rape thus enriches the understandings of lesbo-phobic rape and shows that there are many continuities between the two.

This article treats ambiguous heterosexual experiences—not quite rape, but not quite “just sex” either—as a form of domination, distinct from both coercion and productive power. It argues that if we wish to make sense of the power dynamics involved in these experiences, it may be useful to view the domination that takes place as a kind of interpellation, understood in the Althusserian sense as a mutually constitutive dynamic in which ideologies create “good subjects,” and subjects reproduce ideology. Considering heterosexual domination as a form of Althusserian interpellation enables us to see the power in question as an embodied, intersubjective relation that demands the complicity of dominated persons, with lasting effects on their subjectivity. This approach avoids positing the dominated as helpless victims or passive objects, while bearing witness to and shedding light on their experiences.