Some ecofeminist scholars have argued that being a feminist entails being a contextual vegan. Donna Haraway has opposed this position and received extensive critique. Yet no one, to my knowledge, has systematically studied how Haraway's theory can enrich ecofeminist vegan literature. To this end, I first establish the method of analysis, and/or framework, I use to read Haraway's work, what I call, interconstitutionality. Next, I delineate the limitations of Haraway's thinking insofar as it assumes a position of human dominion over animals. I then explore some aspects of Haraway's theory that can enrich ecofeminist vegan scholarship and provide insights to go beyond the limits of Haraway's corpus regarding: (1) the entanglements and embodied vulnerabilities that constitute human and non-human animals; (2) the agency of animals and the importance of curiosity and respect in leading just lives with other than human animals; (3) the ethical relevance of otherness, difference, and vulnerability at multiple scales: subject, community/herd, species, and cross-species (e.g., there are shared vulnerabilities between beings who are pregnant regardless of the species they belong to); and (4) the unavoidable violence that human existence entails. The text closes by affirming an ecofeminist non-anthropocentric vegan ontology and ethico-politics that aspires to overcome human dominion over animals.

This paper aims to extend the discussion of silencing beyond the realm of speech and to the domain of conversational silences—that is, silences that have communicative functions in our conversational exchanges. I argue that, insofar as we can use silences to communicate, we can also be prevented from doing things with these silences. Alongside a threefold taxonomy I show the different ways in which this can happen, utilizing and extending Maitra's (2009) account of silencing to illustrate the wrong happening in these cases. This discussion not only highlights a new domain of silencing that has, so far, been underexplored, but also uncovers just how deep linguistic injustices can run.

Storytelling in solidaristic communities can foster agency and challenge oppression. However, power imbalances among community members can undermine that potential by contributing to the production of loneliness, where a person loses their sense of self and their sense of belonging within the solidaristic community. To prevent loneliness and to protect the liberatory potential of storytelling, we consider how what we call solidaristic listening might be supported. We first consider, but ultimately reject, empathy as a central feature of solidaristic listening. Despite its popularity in feminist philosophy, empathy is often unable to maintain the relational distance needed between conversation partners to appreciate their differences. Instead, we suggest an ongoing embodied, relational approach to foster solidaristic listening. We draw on three philosophical ideas to motivate our account: visiting the perspectives of others (Arendt 1992), visiting as a reciprocal exchange that requires multiple trips (Simpson 2017), and solidarity as traveling together (Medina 2013).

Previously proposed strategies for tackling hermeneutical injustices take for granted the interests people have in certain things about them being intelligible to them and/or to others, and seek to enable them to satisfy these interests. Strategies of this sort I call interests-as-given strategies. I propose that some hermeneutical injustices can instead be tackled by doing away with certain of these interests, and so with the possibility of their unfair nonsatisfaction. Strategies of this sort I call interests-in-question strategies. As a case study in when such an interests-in-question strategy ought to be pursued, I look at how to tackle hermeneutical injustices arising in the context of gender-affirming healthcare as provided to adults by the National Health Service in the UK. I argue that considerations of trust, privacy, and respect all support pursuing such a strategy. One way to do so, I suggest, would be by replacing the existing gatekeeping model with an informed consent model for the provision of gender-affirming healthcare. Considerations of hermeneutical justice can hence be added to the already-impressive case for undertaking this shift.

This essay theorizes a problem for feminism posed by a particular form of trauma discourse. Feminists have played an important role in developing cultural and clinical conceptions of trauma, but one result of the destigmatization of trauma has been that trauma discourse is sometimes used as a form of cultural capital to reinforce existing hierarchies. In a novel application of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, we show how, when instrumentalized as cultural capital, trauma discourse can be used to reinforce patriarchy and other systems of oppression. We trace a critical feminist history of the struggle to understand and treat trauma. Using examples from contemporary US popular culture, we illustrate the appropriation of trauma discourse to entrench existing structures of gender, class, and racial oppression. First, the misuse of trauma discourse as cultural capital can encourage the instrumental use of trauma claims for cultural power, ultimately reinforcing patriarchy. Second, it might erode the legitimacy of trauma, a conceptual tool pioneered by feminists and still essential to their political claims. This discussion has important implications for not only mental health practitioners and trauma survivors but also feminist theorists, trauma studies scholars, and those interested in deconstructing structural injustice and relations of inequality.

This paper explores how debates on wages for housework in the 1970s contribute to current discourses on redefining, redistributing, and revaluing care. More specifically, this paper asks: How does a rereading of the international Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign contribute to feminist degrowth debates on commoning care and a care income? In trying to answer this question, I revisit original literature and interpretations of WfH and show that, as a Marxist feminist political perspective, the aim of the campaign ventured beyond the monetization of care. Subsequently, I elaborate on the now divergent ideas of Selma James and Silvia Federici, two of the campaign's main founders, of how to re-actualize the transformative aim of the campaign. Their two proposals, namely, a care income and reproductive commons, are introduced, brought into conversation with each other, and critically discussed against the background of Nancy Fraser's distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies of transformation. Exploring the fertile tension between a care income and commoning care, I draw preliminary conclusions on what feminist degrowth can learn from WfH regarding a social-ecological transformation to a more socially just and ecologically sound economic system.

Without females included in the ranks of political founder, Hannah Arendt's theory of political beginning looks dangerously romanticized. Arendt's founder is someone who rises to the challenge of their times, diverting history and renewing public spirit in the process. But despite a methodology that called for recovering the “rich and strange” from the past Arendt does not address the female founders that populate the myths and traditions she cites as instructive. These figures exemplify the unsettling forces and relationality she associates with beginning, but they also signal the high cost of action for the marginalized, including the difficulty some actors face in being recognized at all. If, as she suggests, the founder's persona provides an avenue of recall for the perplexing experience of beginning, then female founders support this recall magnificently while adding a tragic and troubling note that Arendt omits. Their reintroduction into her theory of political beginning takes the shine off her otherwise heroized and happy account.

This article focuses on the role of servants in María Lugones’ “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” I show that Lugones uses and erases the work of servants in developing her understanding of world-traveling. This theoretical marginalization and instrumentalization challenges her claim to capture concrete, lived experience. This article argues that Lugones’ theory is “pseudo-concrete”: it capitulates into the very abstractions it seeks to overcome. Focusing on the role of servants reveals the class character of world-traveling and, in turn, its inability to grasp class relations. This article, thus, invites decolonial feminists to reconsider the advantages of class analysis for understanding not only capitalist domination but also perception, identification, and love.

The relation between time and gender has been extensively discussed in feminist theory, from Simone de Beauvoir to recent studies of queer temporality and crip time. In this article, I explore gender as “lived time” in relation to a pressing feminist issue: social recognition of the chronic illness endometriosis (endo). Based on my interviews with individuals diagnosed with endo, I argue that lived time can be studied by approaching becoming as a dynamic process or flow of recognition, creating certain temporal patterns in the lifeworld. I propose the concept of “endo time” as a phenomenological conception of the lived time of endo. I identify three temporal patterns that characterize endo time: waiting time (I), cyclical or chronic time (II), and sedimented time (III). The analysis contributes to feminist philosophy by detailing how gender appears as a specific orchestration of time. Because of its connection to feminized pain and menstrual flow on the one hand and social recognition on the other, endo presents an illuminating case for exploring the relation between gender, recognition, and lived time.

This paper responds to two trends in debates about Plato's view of women in the Republic. First, many scholars argue or assume that Plato seeks to minimize the influence of femininity in the ideal city, and to make guardian women themselves as “masculine” as possible. Second, scholars who address the relationship between Plato's views of women and his psychological theory tend to focus on the reasoning and appetitive parts of the tripartite soul. In response to the first point, we argue that the idea that Plato seeks to masculinize/de-feminize the city oversimplifies his treatment of Greek gender norms. Although he does want to eliminate some traditionally feminine qualities from the city, he also seeks to eliminate many masculine qualities as well. Moreover, while he tries to make guardian women more like men in some respects, he simultaneously aims to make guardian men more like Greek women in important ways. Regarding the second point, we argue that this project of reimagining gender norms is illuminated by Plato's psychology, but instead of emphasizing reason and appetite, we show how his views are connected to his account of the third, “spirited” part of the soul, thumos, and its dual hard/soft or aggressive/gentle nature.

Biological types, including holotypes and reference genomes, are particular biological entities that represent an entire class of biological entities. This paper presents a feminist analysis of biological typing by asking whether we have reason to criticize the practices of selecting holotypes and reference genomes for being androcentric. I offer three distinct reasons why androcentrism can be objectionable: androcentric practices may inadequately account for traits or experiences of women/females, reinforce male/female dichotomies, or overgeneralize from particulars. I then evaluate whether the practices of selecting holotypes and genomes are objectionably androcentric in these three ways. These typing practices, especially as applied to the case of humans, are objectionably androcentric in some ways but not others. Whether a typing practice problematically ignores the traits or experiences of women depends on whether the typing practice involves non-accidentally taking the traits or experiences of male humans as typical, which, I argue, is true both in the case of holotypes and genomes. Neither holotypes nor genomes reinforce male/female dichotomies, although some features of these practices may appear to do so. Finally, both holotypes and genomes are criticizable for overgeneralizing from particulars, although this criticism does not depend on these practices being androcentric.

Epistemic exhaustion is cognitive fatigue generated by efforts to determine, retain, or communicate what one believes under conditions that make doing so especially taxing. I argue that the creation and maintenance of epistemic exhaustion is a tool that the socially and politically powerful can and do use in order to retain power. I consider a variety of conversational tactics and three circumstances—partisan polarization, epistemic chaos, and epistemic oppression—that can leave people prone to epistemic exhaustion. I survey several common responses to epistemic exhaustion and offer some suggestions for how we ought to respond to epistemically exhausting circumstances.

Saba Mahmood's anthropological work studies the gain in skills, agency, and capacity building by the women's dawa movement in Egypt. These women increase their virtue toward the goal of piety by following dominant, often patriarchal norms. Mahmood argues that “teleological feminism” ignores this gain in agency because this kind of feminism only focuses on opposition or resistance to these norms. In this paper I defend Mahmood's “anti-teleological” feminist work from criticisms that her project valorizes oppression and has no vision for a nonoppressive feminist future. I argue the future envisioned by teleological feminists gets caught in “the Hegelian” trap of replicating past oppression in their feminist future. I find in Mahmood's work the tools to escape this trap. I argue, rather than a movement of overcoming oppression, Mahmood's work suggests an immanent and creative movement that emphasizes difference for a truly new future. I turn to a Bergsonian metaphor and argue that this movement can be seen as akin to the movement of biological evolution. I conclude using the work of Eve Sedgwick that the Egyptian women that Mahmood studies are being read in a “paranoid” fashion and demonstrate using Leila Ahmed a better “reparative” reading of these women.

An apparent antagonism exists between fundamentality-focused mainstream metaphysics such as naturalized metaphysics—a metaphysics inspired and constrained by the findings of our best science—and feminist metaphysics whose subject matter is typically non-fundamental social reality. Taking Karen Barad's agential realism as a case study, this paper argues that these may not be in conflict after all. Agential realism is a metaphysical framework founded on quantum mechanics which shares the characteristic features of naturalized metaphysics. But Barad finds warrant to extend the scope of agential realism all the way to theorizing about our lifeworld as exemplified by her profound influence on feminist new materialism. Thus, this case study indicates that there does not have to be a division between fundamental and feminist metaphysics. The broad intended scope of agential realism is challenged by the success of Newtonian mechanics as an approximation of quantum mechanics, but certain aspects of agential realism promise to be robust under such approximation. If this is so, then Barad provides us with a metaphysics that is naturalized, fundamental, and feminist all at once.

Vulnerability is a notion discussed in feminist philosophy as a basis for a morality that widens our sense of those whose deaths are grievable. Vulnerability and grievability also factor in reproductive ethics. This essay employs recognition theory to analyze critically how these notions are mobilized in conservative Christian anti-abortion writings and in feminist philosophy. This analysis exposes weaknesses and misrecognition in both sets of discourses. In response, I offer theological arguments for recognizing fetal value without implying a right to life and for acknowledging how human finitude and the precarity of pregnancy render gestational hospitality a discretionary, not obligatory, moral act.

In pornography, standard modeling contracts often require a performer to surrender rights over their public image and sexual media in perpetuity and across media. Under these contracts, performers are unable to determine who accesses, for what duration, and under what conditions, their sexual media. As a result, pornography has been described by some performers as a “life sentence”—a phrase which, if true, violates some strong intuitions we share about the importance of autonomy in sexual activity. Using the framework of “affirmative consent,” I argue that these contracts violate performers’ rights to sexual autonomy, and ought therefore to be considered objectionable. Overall, I argue that the legal regimes we create have a strong impact on people's lives, and more important than legislating individual outcomes, the type of infrastructure we build around people's decisions has the potential to radically empower—or disempower—those engaged in sex work.

According to speech-act theory, we do things with words every time we speak. The most striking thing one can do with words is to exercise authority over others, such as when a judge issues a guilty verdict in a criminal trial. Some speakers hold this kind of authority without good reason; this kind of speech constitutes an unjust imposition of authority, and thus arguably harms in a direct, non-metaphorical sense; it would seem, therefore, that it should not be protected by freedom of speech. The problem in these cases, however, does not lie in the words that harmful speakers utter, but in the things they have the power to do with them. It is this power, it seems, that must be dismantled: in speech-act terms, we must tackle felicity conditions, not locutions. This paper defends this insight. By providing an account of the (alleged) authority of pornographers as both epistemic and informal, I claim that the presumption against censoring porn is not lifted even if the speech-act argument succeeds in showing that pornography can be constitutive of harm. This does not mean that such harms should not be countered, but they should be countered as the specific kinds of harms that they are.

Martha Nussbaum in her The New Religious Intolerance (2012) commits several old forms of epistemic vice including exclusion, orientalism, and colonial discourse. Unsurprisingly, as a result, her text contributes to the production of ignorance about Muslims and Muslim women despite her intention of combating Islamophobia. In this article, I specifically critique Nussbaum's anti-burqa-ban arguments and her pro-airport-profiling stance. To do so, I draw on the work of Audre Lorde and other feminist scholars and scholars of color to express the harms of excluding Muslim voices and misusing Western/white voices in their place. Recalling Edward Said, Marilyn Frye, and María Lugones, I argue that Nussbaum's text is a classic example of orientalism and various forms of colonial discourse.

This paper considers the use of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “becoming-woman” for feminist theory. Since its first use, the concept has polarized feminist theory. For some, it presents the route out of masculinist logics that third-wave feminism has sought; for others, it denies the female experience and returns “woman” to universalizing, implicitly masculine presuppositions. The paper argues that both are partly right, and that the disagreement stems from an underdeveloped consideration of how “being” and “becoming” coexist in time. Following Rosi Braidotti, the paper claims that “woman” must be understood not in essentialist terms, but as the “virtual feminine” who is the contested subject of sexual difference. Seen this way, woman's being is inseparable from her becoming. The paper therefore argues that we must understand the mutually constitutive relation of being and becoming that produces “woman” in this sense. Drawing on Deleuze's discussion of Aion and Chronos, the paper sees the subject of feminism as temporally dislocated, with both a being and a becoming, rooted in a present that she is always moving beyond. But it claims that this is central for reconciling the conflicting understandings of becoming-woman, and so for preserving the concept as a feminist tool.

Although the idea that sexual violence is a “structural” problem is not new, the lack of specification as to what that entails blocks effective responses to it. This paper illustrates the concept of sexual violence as structural in the sense of containing a type of moral wrong called “structural wrong” and discusses its practical implications. First, I introduce a distinction between two types of moral wrongs—interactional wrongs and structural wrongs—and I argue that the moral problem of sexual violence includes both types, each of which calls for a different set of moral responses. Second, drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model of responsibility, I argue that recognizing the structural-wrong element of sexual violence does not reduce individual perpetrators’ responsibility for it. Instead, it implies that a broader group of agents are required to join collective actions to reform the social structure. I conclude by evaluating some preventive programs against sexual violence through the lens of structural wrongs and providing directions to advance them.