Motivated ignorance is an incentivized absence of knowledge that arises in circumstances of unequal power relations, a self-protective non-knowing which frees individuals from having to reflect on the privileges they have in virtue of membership in a dominant social group. In philosophical discussions, the term “motivated ignorance” gets used interchangeably with “willful ignorance.” In the first half of this paper, using Charles Mills’ (2007) white ignorance as the defining case, I argue that this is a mistake. A significant swath of cases of motivated ignorance are non-willful, or deep, following Rik Peels (2010). But in all cases, benefits accrued to some in virtue of their social position are gained and maintained at the expense of harms to others. In the second half of this paper, I argue that these harms are what ground attributions of culpability in cases of motivated ignorance and drive the normative requirement that the subject know better, so long as the facts in question are ordinarily and easily knowable (in a sense to be specified). Willfulness is not a necessary condition for culpability, even if it is a sufficient one.

Despite the broad agreement that microaggressions cause harm, there is disagreement on how to capture microaggressor's accountability. Friedlaender (2018) argues that, in many cases, survivors of microaggressions are not justified in holding the microaggressor blameworthy or blaming them (Friedlaender 2018, 14). I argue, in contrast, that we are generally justified in holding most microaggressors blameworthy and blaming them. By adopting a broadly blame-inclusive account of microaggressor accountability, we are in a position to satisfy the desiderata an ideal account should meet: (1) account for cumulative harm; (2) consistently allow for standing to forgive; and (3) be risk sensitive to the microaggressed. By possessing these virtues, I believe my view of microaggressor accountability better equips us to take seriously the harm caused by microaggressions and center the well-being of microaggressees. I respond to Friedlaender's concerns regarding epistemic ignorance and what they call the disaggregation problem. In contrast to Friedlaender's broadly blame-exclusive responsibility model, I motivate a broadly blame-inclusive model for holding microaggressors accountable, explaining how it fulfills the desiderata. I respond to the objection that my account is too blame-inclusive by providing examples of (1) justified microaggressions; (2) excused microaggressions; and (3) blameworthiless microaggressions where blame is justified all the same.

This paper investigates women's learning experiences in the Confucian tradition and the social dismay and stigma associated with them. Despite being considered a meta-virtue in the Confucian tradition, learning becomes rather complex when women are the learners. It is viewed by learned women as a curse rather than a blessing in pre-modern China; it is associated with the stigma of “leftover women” and “the third sex” in contemporary China. Based on an examination of works written by women thinkers, I argue that the asymmetry in social recognition for men's and women's learning is rooted in the social and family structure of nei (in) and wai (out), which does not assign sufficient cultural and moral significance to learning achieved in the nei domain nor permit its continuous and accumulative existence. I propose two preliminary steps to rectify the issue of the lack of social and moral recognition of women's learning: first, a reforming of the nei and wai structure to allow assigning more moral, cultural, and normative significance to affairs in the nei domain. Second, re-examine and utilize classical Confucian texts such as the Mencius and later works by women writers to support and guide such reformations.

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.

What are the matters of philosophy? How do they shape how philosophy is practiced, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and who counts as a philosopher? The dominant matters of Western philosophy, or its epistemic companions, are books and journal articles even when dialogic and oral traditions are acknowledged or referenced. In this paper, we argue that alternatives would be necessary if philosophy were to be a more capacious and welcoming discipline. We introduce Feminist Philosophical Toys as one such alternative that challenges what counts as serious philosophy by being seriously playful. The toys foreground the oral and the dialogic while reflecting on and committing to engaging materiality, record-keeping, and record-making. In doing so, the toys challenge the dominant form of philosophy and its mechanics of knowledge-making as they offer an alternative way of doing philosophy that can be transformative for the next generation of feminist scholarship. The dialogic, embodied, and communal interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, opening philosophy to a new groundedness and accessibility, centered in the ethos of feminist epistemology, while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter.

As we theorize about philosophy of language that bears on social and political issues, it is worth revisiting the methodological question of how we as theorists rely on our philosophical and linguistic intuitions, and what assumptions underlie our justification of such a reliance. Two threads in the philosophical literature are relevant to this question: the discussion of situatedness in feminist epistemology and the debate about philosophical expertise and philosophical intuitions. I argue that philosophers examining social and political philosophy of language should be careful—perhaps more careful than we have been—when we rely on our intuitions to draw conclusions about socially significant language, such as racist, sexist, homophobic, and other derogatory speech. I don’t claim we should give up relying on our intuitions. Instead, I argue that we should be more explicit that our intuitions are limited, and open to the possibility that they might not align with the intuitions of those who have more experience with the kinds of speech we are analyzing. As a result, we might find that the conclusions we draw from our intuitions have to be revised or qualified.

Catcalls have been said to insult, intimidate, and silence their targets. The harms that catcalls inflict on individuals are reason enough to condemn them. This paper argues that they also inflict a type of structural harm by subordinating their targets. Catcalling initiates an unwanted conversation where none should exist. This brings the rules and norms governing conversations to bear in such a way that the catcall assigns their target a “subordinate discourse role.” This not only constrains the behavior of the target here and now, but also influences the norms governing future conversations. Catcalls are then not only bad because of the effects on their target, but also because of their pernicious contribution to the wider normative landscape.

The starting point of this paper is a clarification of the forms that hermeneutical injustice takes for bisexual individuals. While it is often thought that bisexuals do not need special protections or politics because they easily “pass” for straight and thus enjoy so-called hetero privilege, this precise situation is a source of oppression, silencing, erasure, and discrimination for many of them within both straight and gay environments. Bi-invisibility, bi-erasure, and persistent negative stereotypes contribute to specific forms of hermeneutical injustice for this segment of the population. Reflection on these forms, however, as well as reflection on bisexual identity, highlights some problematic aspects connected to the metaphor of hermeneutical “gaps” and the underlying theoretical model that are often used or assumed in research on epistemic injustice. With the aim of clarifying and responding to such difficulties, I introduce Wittgenstein's notion of hinges as a conceptual tool to better understand these phenomena. The case of bisexuality shows that seeing hermeneutical injustice in the light of the metaphor of hinges, instead of that of gaps, helps better grasp its features, its causes, and the forms that it can assume.

While the concept of interspecies solidarity has been central to ecofeminist work on animal rights since the 1980s, less attention has been devoted to the question of animal desire within the feminist animal care tradition, the majority of which has focused on women's and animals’ shared oppression under patriarchy. This article offers a reformulation of feminist animal care ethics, one that seeks to recenter animal desire as the ground for interspecies solidarity. The first section of the article offers a review of the relationship between women and interspecies solidarity as articulated within the feminist animal care tradition. Part two draws upon multispecies ethnographic participant observation at a cat sanctuary in Syros, Greece, to account for questions of animal agency, as well as the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of interspecies care work. The final section of the article concludes by considering the ways in which grief and mourning are central to the decolonial project of feminist interspecies care and solidarity in a post-pandemic world.

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.

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 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.

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.