The proposal that care ethic(s) (CE) be subsumed under the framework of virtue ethic(s) (VE) is both promising and problematic for feminists. Although some attempts to construe care as a virtue are more commendable than others, they cannot duplicate a freestanding feminist CE. Sander-Staudt recommends a model of theoretical collaboration between VE and CE that retains their comprehensiveness, allows CE to enhance VE as well as be enhanced by it, and leaves CE open to other collaborations.

The aim of this paper is to show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been mistakenly interpreted as a theory of gender, because interpreters have failed adequately to understand Beauvoir's aims. Beauvoir is not trying to explain facts, events, or states of affairs, but to reveal, unveil, or uncover (découvrir) meanings. She explicates the meanings of woman, female, and feminine. Instead of a theory, Beauvoir's book presents a phenomenological description of the sexual difference.

This article invites disability scholars to “get fat,” that is, to support the goals of the fat justice movement. I argue that the contemporary politics of fatness can productively be read through the lens of disability studies’ social model. At the same time, I mobilize feminist critiques of the social model to push fat disability studies toward a more in‐depth engagement with the topics of health and illness. Additionally, I contend that feminist scholars’ accounts of our personal relationships to fatness and disability can make crucial contributions to our scholarly work. These arguments take shape within a new interpretive framework that I introduce: “setpoint epistemology,” which brings together the feminist disability studies notion of “sitpoint theory” and the scientific concept of “setpoint theory.”

Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct temporality of the lived, stuttering body disturbs the normalized “choreography” of communication and thereby threatens the disabled speaker's recognition as a speaking subject. Examined through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Alfred Schutz, the disabled speaking body is temporally “out of step” with the normalized bodily rhythms and pace of communicative practices in relation to both lived and objective time. Disciplined for his incalculable and therefore irrational bodily choreography, the disabled speaker is foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world constituted by a disembodied and hegemonic “straight‐masculine” time. Although dominant communicative choreographies may often be unlivable for disabled speakers, cripping communicative time rejects the cardinal value of futurity and invites interlocutors to gather in a noninstrumentalized and nonproductive present. This reshaping of communicative space enacts new modes of relationality and opens up an array of communicative futures suppressed or cut off by straight‐masculine time.

Due to its problematic political and social position between two opposed sexual cultures, bisexuality has often been ignored by feminist and lesbian theorists both as a concept and a realm of experiences. The essay argues that bisexuality, precisely because it transgresses bipolar notions of fixed gendered and sexed identities, is usefully explored by lesbian and feminist theorists, enhancing our effort to devise an ethics of difference and to develop nonoppressive ways of responding to alterity.

Disability scholars have critiqued medical models that pathologize disability as an individual flaw that needs treatment, rehabilitation, and cure, favoring instead a social‐constructionist approach that likens disability to other identity categories such as gender, race, class, and sexuality. However, the emphasis on social constructionism has left chronic illness and pain largely untheorized. This article argues that feminist disability studies (FDS) must attend to the common, chronic gynecological condition endometriosis (endo) when theorizing pain. Endo is particularly important for FDS analysis because the highly feminized and sexualized nature of endo pain is a major source of disability. Because medical treatments of endo enhance fertility rather than provide pain relief, those with endo must not only have access to medical services to manage their pain, but also demand better medical management of their pain as well as disability accommodations for their pain. Thus, I propose a pain‐centric model of disability that politicizes pain through social‐constructionist and medical models of disability by attending to the lived experiences of pain.

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this “denaturalization” of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be “renaturalized” so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper.

Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their components. We also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge.

According to Miranda Fricker, a hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a deficit in our shared tools of social interpretation (the collective hermeneutical resource), such that marginalized social groups are at a disadvantage in making sense of their distinctive and important experiences. Critics have claimed that Fricker's account ignores or precludes a phenomenon I call hermeneutical dissent, where marginalized groups have produced their own interpretive tools for making sense of those experiences. I clarify the nature of hermeneutical injustice to make room for hermeneutical dissent, clearing up the structure of the collective hermeneutical resource and the fundamental harm of hermeneutical injustice. I then provide a more nuanced account of the hermeneutical resources in play in instances of hermeneutical injustice, enabling six species of the injustice to be distinguished. Finally, I reflect on the corrective virtue of hermeneutical justice in light of hermeneutical dissent.

Images of vulnerability have populated the philosophical landscape from Hobbes to Hegel, Levinas to Foucault, often designating a sense of corporeal susceptibility to injury, or of being threatened or wounded and therefore have been predominantly associated with violence, finitude, or mortality. More recently, feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have begun to rethink corporeal vulnerability as a critical or ethical category, one based on our primary interdependence and intercorporeality. However, many contemporary theorists continue to associate vulnerability with violence and finitude rather than providing an account of the normative theory that might underpin vulnerability as a critical category. In this article, I explore an alternative notion of vulnerability in relation to both a theory of power and a normative account that draws on recognition theory. My aim in this article is twofold: first, to examine the complexity of vulnerability and how it relates to forms of recognition; second, to outline how the notion of vulnerability can operate as the basis for critiquing objectionable forms of vulnerability. This is to consider vulnerability not only as an ethical or ontological question but as a political one, and shifts arguments about its abuse and entanglement with power and violence to the public political sphere.

Commercial surrogacy arrangements now cross borders; this paper aims to reevaluate the traditional moral concerns regarding the practice against the added ethical dimension of global injustice. I begin by considering the claim that global surrogacy serves to satisfy the positive reproductive rights of infertile first‐world women. I then go on to consider three powerful challenges to this claim. The first holds that commercial surrogacy involves the commodification of a good that should not be valued in market terms, the second that it involves the exploitation of the labor of disadvantaged women, and the third that it depends on the illegitimate privileging of positive rights over negative rights. I reject the first of these challenges and argue that global surrogacy arrangements are indeed exploitative on the dual basis of what I call intracontractual injustice and intercontractual coercion. The latter, I contend, depends on a preexisting negative rights violation, which cannot be permitted for the sake of satisfying another's positive reproductive entitlement. I conclude not in favor of a global ban but with suggestions on how developing nations that permit commercial surrogacy might better protect the negative reproductive rights of their female citizens, thereby making them less vulnerable to exploitation.

On the most general level, this essay addresses the ways race is deployed in biomedical solutions to infertility. Szkupinski Quiroga begins with general assertions about fertility technology. She then explores how fertility technology reinforces biological links between parents and children and argues that most options reflect and privilege white kinship patterns and fears about race mixing. She illustrates these observations with interviews she has collected.

This paper demonstrates how John Dewey's notion of habit can help us understand gender as a constitutive structure of bodily existence. Bringing Dewey's pragmatism in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, 1 provide an account of how rigid binary configurations of gender might be transformed at the level of both individual habit and cultural construct.

This article is a critical examination of Nancy Fraser's contrast of early second‐wave feminism and contemporary global feminism in “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” (Fraser 2009). Fraser contrasts emancipatory early second‐wave feminism, strongly critical of capitalism, with feminism in the age of neoliberalism as being in a “dangerous liaison” with neoliberalism. I argue that Fraser's historical account of 1970s mainstream second‐wave feminism is inaccurate, that it was not generally anti‐capitalist, critical of the welfare system, or challenging the priority of paid labor. I claim Fraser mistakenly takes a minority feminist position as mainstream. I further argue that Fraser's account of feminism today echoes arguments from James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2001) to Hester Eisenstein (2009), but such arguments ignore contemporary feminist minority positions. I challenge Fraser's arguments that feminism legitimates neoliberalism to women, that women's NGOs are simply service‐providers enabling the state to withdraw services, and that criticisms of microcredit lending programs can be generalized into criticisms of women's feminism and women's NGOs today. I argue that these claims are vast over‐generalizations and ignore countertrends. I give empirical evidence to support my objections by considering women's activities in post‐communist European countries, which Fraser discusses.

This article critically examines the constitution of impairment in prenatal testing and screening practices and various discourses that surround these technologies. While technologies to test and screen (for impairment) prenatally are claimed to enhance women's capacity to be self-determining, make informed reproductive choices, and, in effect, wrest control of their bodies from a patriarchal medical establishment, I contend that this emerging relation between pregnant women and reproductive technologies is a new strategy of a form of power that began to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, my argument is that the constitution of prenatal impairment, by and through these practices and procedures, is a widening form of modem government that increasingly limits the field of possible conduct in response to pregnancy. Hence, the government of impairment in utero is inextricably intertwined with the government of the maternal body.

If someone says, “Asians are good at math” or “women are empathetic,” I might interject, “you're stereotyping” in order to convey my disapproval of their utterance. But why is stereotyping wrong? Before we can answer this question, we must better understand what stereotypes are and what stereotyping is. In this essay, I develop what I call the descriptive view of stereotypes and stereotyping. This view is assumed in much of the psychological and philosophical literature on implicit bias and stereotyping, yet it has not been sufficiently defended. The main objection to the descriptive view is that it fails to include the common‐sense idea that stereotyping is always objectionable. I argue that this is actually a benefit of the view. In the essay's final part, I put forward two hypotheses that would validate the claim that stereotyping is always morally or epistemically wrong. If these hypotheses are false—which is very likely—we have little reason to build moral or epistemic defect into the very idea of a stereotype. Moreover, we must abandon the seemingly attractive claim that judging individuals based on group membership is intrinsically wrong.

This essay engages Chandra Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and María Lugones in a “plurilogue” to elaborate and exhibit a method that animates the differential mode of Women of Color politics while rendering more acute the strategies each scholar offers against the racialized, gendered oppressions of colonialism and global capitalism. Ella Shohat describes “a multifaceted plurilogue” as a “dissonant polyphony” that “links different yet co‐implicated constituencies and arenas of struggle” (Shohat 2001, 2). The emphasis on reading differences within Women of Color theorizing resists the homogenizing tendency of superficial engagement that glosses Women of Color scholarship as a unified genre of thought. A plurilogue thus pursues dissimilarities to clarify the conceptual interventions made within Women of Color theorizing and the relationship among the different patterns of oppression that each intervention exposes. Plurilogued engagements bring these conceptual strategies and understandings of multiple oppressions together, not to resolve or rank them, but to more effectively ascertain the complexities of, and varied coalitional strategies for, resisting the racialized, heteropatriarchal oppressions of global capitalism and colonialism.

What does woman mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which woman can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this article I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view that can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean.

This article argues that gaushalas, or cow shelters, in India are mobilized as sites of Hindutva or Hindu ultranationalism, where it is a “vulnerable” Hindu Indian nation—or the “Hindu mother cow” as Mother India—who needs “sanctuary” from predatory Muslim males. Gaushalas are rendered spaces of (re)production of cows as political, religious, and economic capital, and sustained by the combined and compatible narratives of “anthropatriarchy” and Hindu patriarchy. Anthropatriarchy is framed as the human enactment of gendered oppressions upon animal bodies, and is crucial to sustaining all animal agriculture. Hindu patriarchy refers to the instrumentalization of female and feminized bodies (women, cows, “Mother India”) as “mothers” and cultural guardians of a “pure” Hindu civilization. Both patriarchies commodify bovine motherhood and breastmilk. which this article frames as a feminist issue. Through empirical research, this article demonstrates that gaushalas generally function as spaces of exploitation, incarceration, and gendered violence for the animals. The article broadens posthumanist feminist theory to illustrate how bovine bodies, akin to women's bodies, are mobilized as productive, reproductive, and symbolic capital to advance Hindu extremism and ultranationalism. It subjectifies animal bodies as landscapes of nation‐making using ecofeminism and its subfield of vegan feminism.