Cis feminist theorists sometimes employ rhetorical moves to claim innocence while abdicating responsibility for engaging with trans scholarship and theory as well as structural transmisogyny. I suggest that it is helpful to understand this phenomenon using a conception of cis feminist moves to innocence. These rhetorical moves enable cisgender feminists to falsely position their failure to engage with both trans scholarship and structures of transmisogyny as epistemically virtuous.

Audre Lorde's account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to political theory and feminist activism, but her explanation of the term in her brief essay “Uses of the Erotic” is famously oblique and ambiguous. This article develops a detailed, textually grounded interpretation of Lorde's erotic, based on an analysis of how Lorde's essay brings together commitments expressed across her work. I describe four integral elements of Lorde's erotic: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic is a way of feeling in the work a person does, which makes possible new knowledge about the self and the social environment—particularly to counteract epistemic oppression imposed by an unjust society. The erotic is a source of power by providing vision and energy for actions integrating a person's multiple commitments and political interests. It facilitates concerted action and coalition by enhancing a person's appreciation of their interests and values, while fostering embodied, personal connections that build trust based on shared vulnerability. Thus, the erotic helps build coalitions where genuine differences of perspective and experience can be examined, in resistance against an oppressive society's epistemic distortions.

Care ethics has attracted much scholarly attention since its inception in the 1980s. As befits a moral theory, which is how it is frequently perceived, those working in the field have increasingly sought to clarify and make robust elements central to the project. This article hopes to offer a small but important contribution to this iterative process. I make a case for resisting what is characterized as the recognition claim found in the work of Joan Tronto, Nel Noddings, and Eva Feder Kittay. This is the claim that for an action to be caring it is necessarily recognized as such by whomever is being cared for. I explicate the arguments pertaining to this issue in these authors’ writings and conclude that not only do the arguments fall short of showing the necessity for including this aspect in an ethics of care, but I make preliminary arguments as to the implications for resisting the inclusion of the recognition claim. The thrust of these suggestions is that care ethics is a better moral theory when it admits to degrees of care rather than taking a binary view.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir diagnoses “woman” as the “lost sex,” torn between her individual autonomy and her “feminine destiny.” Becoming a “real woman” in patriarchal societies demands that women lose their authentic, autonomous selves to become the “inessential Other” for Man. To better understand this diagnosis and how women might refind themselves, I rehabilitate the influence of Søren Kierkegaard and his concept of repetition as what must be lost to be found again in Beauvoir's account of freedom and, specifically, the liberation of women. Beauvoir offers a dual account of repetition, that of mundane repetition and sacrificial repetition, bringing them to bear both on her diagnosis of women's oppression and her theorization of our liberation. Sacrificial repetition becomes a temporality for freedom—one must be able to repeat or retake their autonomy continuously toward an open future. For this to happen concretely, Beauvoir insists that we must sacrifice the (racist, classist) patriarchal ideals of the “real woman” and “real man” as we retake our autonomy and reconfigure the meaning of sex difference anew.

Naming performs an important function in society. Names shape our reality by creating the means to bring into existence previously unseen events or unacknowledged experiences, and naming impacts how society responds to these. This article interrogates the problem of naming the phenomenon of violence and abuse during childbirth with a focus on three principal concepts: “mistreatment,” “disrespect and abuse,” and “obstetric violence.” Further, drawing from broader feminist literature, it exposes the hidden power struggles that inform the naming process in this context, and it challenges the notion that “mistreatment” and “disrespect and abuse” are suitable dominant discourses. In essence, it argues that should a dominant discourse emerge, it should not be one formulated by the healthcare sector (as is the case with “mistreatment”) given their leading role in abuse and violence during childbirth. Finally, the article highlights that we are in the early stages of understanding this phenomenon and, as such, our communicative framework should be broad enough to include multiple communicative tools including “obstetric violence.”

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.

This article offers a rereading of Monique Wittig's philosophical writing on sex, gender, and sexuality against some of the major criticisms that have led to limited engagement with her work. I argue that reorienting our understanding of Wittig's lesbian-feminism away from notions of sexuality per se enables us to read her in terms of a larger project that takes aim at the primacy of phallocentrism in how we understand subjectivity. In doing so, I establish and situate three themes in her feminism that have remained largely unremarked upon in contemporary philosophical treatments of her work: domination, utopianism, and polysemy. Part of this reorientation also involves taking seriously the place of language in her philosophy and examining the ways in which she textually expresses the “lesbian” in her literature—a facet similarly underexamined. Although the account of Wittig's philosophy given here is by no means definitive, I aim through this preliminary re-evaluation to provide a richer reading of Wittig's work against prevailing criticism, demonstrate her continuing relevance to feminist thought, and present further avenues of investigation.

From the beginning of the practice of surrogate pregnancy, ethical approaches to it have included several dimensions. Central issues such as surrogates’ genuine autonomy, the risk of exploitation of people in vulnerable situations, or the legitimacy of the commercialization of the body have kept this debate alive for more than three decades. Among all the conflicts, those related to healthcare professionals involved in the surrogacy process have been less frequently addressed. Which patient(s) should they protect? Whose interests should they preserve, the surrogate mother's or the intended parents’? Are there differences in healthcare provision between regular pregnant women and those who are going to relinquish their babies? Is adequate compliance with the ethical standards of the caregiver–patient relationship possible? In this article, I will address these questions to identify interests and practices at stake in the healthcare context, where an important part of the surrogacy process occurs.

Obstetric violence—violence in the labor room—has been described in terms not only of violence in general but of gender violence specifically. This feminist-phenomenological analysis demonstrates features that the experiences of torture and of obstetric violence share. Many birthing subjects describe their experiences of obstetric violence as torture. This use of the concept of torture to explain what they have gone through is not trivial and deserves philosophical attention. In this article, we give several examples (mainly from Chilean women's birth narratives), examining them through phenomenological and feminist phenomenological analyses of torture. We argue that, as with torture, it is not mere pain that marks the experience of obstetric violence, but rather a state of ontological loneliness and desolation, a detachment from the previous known world, and a loss of trust in those surrounding us. But if obstetric violence is gender violence, this must be gendered torture: it is perpetrated with the goal of humiliating and controlling women, of reifying them and robbing them of their free embodied subjectivities in labor.

This article discusses Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht's (1718–63) poem Fruentimrets Försvar, Emot J. J. Rousseau Medborgare i Genève (Nordenflycht 1761) [Defense of the female sex against J. J. Rousseau, citizen of Geneva], written as a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Lettre sur les spectacles (1758; in Rousseau 1968). Heretofore, Nordenflycht's poem has been considered primarily from the perspective of national literary and intellectual history, but here it is maintained that the poem should be related to the context of the European Enlightenment. Specifically, I argue that Nordenflycht uses key political concepts to create an argument for women's rights as a form of natural, human rights. By focusing on Nordenflycht's contentions regarding natural equality and artificial inequality, the tyrannical treatment of women, and women's right to liberty and occupations, this article elucidates how a woman writer from the periphery of the Enlightenment had created and presented, by the 1760s, a sustained argument—in verse—for female liberty in public life, for the benefit not only of women but of all humankind.

Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pioneers of women's intellectual networks, it interrogates and intervenes within our understanding of first-wave feminisms. By foregrounding the interaction of claims for gender justice with anti-imperialist discourse, the mehfil provides an early model of women's collectivity that hinges not on demands for suffrage or other legislative reform, but on critique of colonial patriarchy.

This article looks at the implications of medical colonialism in Canada for the feminist concept of care. Because medical colonialism is an ongoing material relation where “good” settler care cannot be separated from Indigenous dispossession, I defend the view that care and violence can be coextensive and suggest that a decolonial care ethic needs to disrupt the directionality of care as flowing from agential carers toward colonized care-receivers. I argue that contemporary medical colonialism should indeed be understood as a form of care if structural harm is to be addressed in practice, and trouble the notion of inclusion at work in some contemporary theories of care. By finding demands for assimilationist “participatory inclusion” in examples of government-run, Indigenous-serving care services, I caution against the implicit settler-colonial assumptions in notions of “caring democracies” and “caring societies” on the welfare-state model. If care is political and can participate in the normative pressures of civic assimilation, then to “decolonize” it through refraction, disruption, infiltration, disconnection, re-appropriation, and resistance also means to “decolonize” citizenship and civic life in the interests of Indigenous self-determination, rather than presumed inclusion in settler-state processes.

This article argues that shifts between deontological and virtue-ethical moral reasoning hamper public moral conversations about misogyny and racism. Using examples ranging from sexual assault to police violence, I show that when someone is accused of committing a moral wrong, they often respond by shifting from deontological to virtue-ethical modes of analysis. This kind of “toggling” between the two enables a person to claim that they are “a good person” even when they have violated important moral rules. In this way, toggling shuts down or makes incoherent our efforts to call one another to moral account, especially (but by no means exclusively) when we are attempting to address issues of systemic oppression and discrimination, including misogyny and racism.

In this article I defend an account of beauty labor as a form of resistance that can enable individuals and communities to combat body oppression. Focusing on the “Fuck Flattering!” movement, a social-media-driven movement in which fat people purposefully wear unflattering clothing to resist antifat fashion and oppressive body standards, I first set three criteria necessary for an act of beauty labor to count as one of resistance. I argue that (1) the agent in question must be situated as a less ideal candidate for attributions of beauty, (2) the agent must have some level of knowledge or awareness of the norms (defined in light of dominant groups) and their harms, and (3) that knowledge or awareness of the harms of said norms must inform the agent's act of beauty labor. Based on this account of beauty labor as resistance, I argue that beauty labor can combat larger systems of oppression and incite meaningful change insofar as it enables individuals to claim and reclaim space (both digital and physical) from which fat people have been historically excluded, while affording an opportunity for education and unpacking of oppression and bias, and expanding the fashion industry.

Philosophical inquiry strives to be the unencumbered exploration of ideas. That is, unlike scientific research, which is subject to ethical oversight, it is commonly thought that it would either be inappropriate, or that it would undermine what philosophy fundamentally is, if philosophical research were subject to similar ethical oversight. Against this, I argue that philosophy is in need of a reckoning. Philosophical inquiry is a morally hazardous practice with its own risks. There are risks present in the methods we employ, risks inherent in the content of the views under consideration, and risks to the subjects of our inquiry. Likely, there are more risks still. However, by starting with the identification of these three risks we can demonstrate not only why an ethics of practice is needed but also which avenues are the most promising for developing an ethics for philosophical practice. Although we might just be in the business of asking questions, we do not merely, in virtue of engaging in philosophical inquiry, absolve ourselves of responsibility for the risks that inquiry incurs.

The gray area of sexual violations generally refers to ambiguous sexual experiences that are not readily distinguishable from rape or sex. Such experiences are describable as ambiguous or complex in a way that, to some, seems to defy existent categories of sexual experiences. This leads some feminists to approach the gray area as a puzzle that must be resolved either by understanding it as a new category, or by upholding existing rape categorization. Rather than dispelling the gray-area ambiguity by resolving conceptual puzzles, I assign the gray-area ambiguity a positive analytical role by attending to it in a historical and dialectical light. By tracing histories of feminist antirape discourse, I elaborate a way of understanding the “gray area” of sexual violations, articulating it as a historical condition affecting the interpretive possibilities of our sexual experiences. Such an approach underscores the potential of the gray area to inaugurate feminist critique in virtue of its status as a historically specific yet ambiguous horizon where our experiences can contradictorily seem not-like rape, but not-like sex.

Hermeneutical injustice, as a species of epistemic injustice, is when members of marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources, where this deficiency is traditionally interpreted as a lack of concepts. Against this understanding, this article argues that even if adequate concepts that describe marginalized groups’ experiences are available within the collective hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice can persist. This article offers an analysis of how this can happen by introducing the notion of hermeneutical excess: the introduction of additional concepts into collective hermeneutical resources that function to obscure agents’ understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized groups. The injustice of hermeneutical excesses happens not due to hermeneutical marginalization (the exclusion of members of marginalized groups from the construction of hermeneutical resources), but rather from hermeneutical domination: when members of dominant groups have been inappropriately included in the construction of hermeneutical resources. By taking as exemplary cases the concepts of “reverse racism” and “nonconsensual sex,” this article shows how such excesses are introduced as a kind of defensive strategy used by dominant ideologies precisely when progress with social justice is made.

The recent debate in feminist philosophy about an adequate concept of woman presupposes the distinction between sex and gender, and most proposals operate on the gender level. Building on Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi suggested an account of “woman” that does not rely on the distinction between sex and gender (Moi 1999a). She criticizes that this distinction suggests too strong a separation between the bodily and social dimensions of a person's identity. Instead, her account of “woman” centers around the phenomenological concept of the “body as situation” or the lived/living body (Leib). This understanding of the body emphasizes a person's subjective experience of their own body rather than a third-personal (for example, medical) perspective on humans’ bodies. With her proposal, Moi aims, on the one hand, to resist biological determinism, and, on the other, to avoid the dualism of the sex/gender distinction. In this article, I re-introduce Moi's position to the recent debate and examine how it fares regarding the “inclusion problem” (Katharine Jenkins) toward trans women. I suggest that Moi's account provides resources for an attractive, individualistic, and hence inclusive account of embodied gender identity. For political purposes, however, we also need to analyze concrete contexts of gender-related oppression.

Accounts of sexual experience, sexual oppression, and sexual violation, if they are not to lend support to the problems they are invoked to address, require the foundation of a phenomenological description of the character of experience. Relying on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I aim to provide this foundation, arguing that sexual experience is a domain not of detached, individual autonomy but of intrinsic susceptibility and exposure to the world. My description of sexual experience is intended to reveal the immanent norms that sexuality projects and thereby to critique ways of inhabiting experience that disavow what is revealed in that description. The first section discerns three ambiguities that characterize our experience in Merleau-Ponty's notion of “flesh”: that between materiality and meaning, self and others, and self and world. The second section offers a phenomenology of sexual experience based on these ambiguities. The third section, on sexual oppression and suppression, identifies two stereotypical ways in which they are evaded: what I call the stances of “withdrawal from” and “control of” sexuality as flesh. Finally, the fourth section reveals the shortcomings of the legal-juridical domain in navigating our status as flesh, and warns against the proliferation of its terms, specifically the norm of consent.

In “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value,” G. A. Cohen offers an anticapitalist philosophy of valuing that takes as given the existence itself of particular valuable and valued things, and commitment through time to cherishing relationships to them. In this article, I argue that “being placed,” in precolonial senses, and decolonial “being in” and “seeking place,” are the givens of being valuing, living creatures among valuing, living creatures. Valuing as placed and valuing being placed are intrinsic to decolonial feminist resistance to the gendered, racialized, and denatured ideological warfare on the terms of life. Place is not one among other values; place and placed temporality must be accepted as given. In place, the past is living in the present. Placed decolonial valuing is the only resistance to solipsistic destruction of all that has value, to a coloniality that would fragment the past to destroy the life force of the capacity to value present existing and living. Thus I bring Cohen's rescuing valuable things, and the capacity to value them, to intergenerational, interspecies, temporally located placedness shared across diverse peoples prior to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conquests and nineteenth-century imperialism, and in perpetual resistance to contemporary settler societies and coloniality.