Octavia Butler depicts a character with physical or mental disability in each of her works. Yet scholars hesitate to discuss her work in terms that emphasize the intersection with disability. Two salient questions arise: How might it change Butler scholarship if we situated intersectional embodied experience as a central locus for understanding her work? Once we privilege such intersectionality, how might this transform our understanding of the aesthetics of the novel? In this paper, I reorient the criticism of Butler's work such that disability becomes one of the social categories under consideration. I read two prominent analyses of Butler's work because their interpretations—black feminist in orientation—centralize black female identity as a category of analysis. I contend these analyses grapple with ideas that can only be fully understood with disability as an integral portion of the discussion. Since categories of analysis like race, disability, and gender require and create cultural tropes and challenge accepted forms, I outline three components of Butler's aesthetic: open‐ended conclusions that frustrate the narrative cohesion associated with the novel form, intricate depictions of power that potentially alienate the able‐bodied reader, and contained literary chaos that upends the idea of ontological fixity.

Although G. A. Cohen's work on Marx was flawed by a lack of gender‐awareness, his work on Rawls owes much of its success to feminist inspiration. Cohen appeals effectively to feminism to rebut the basic structure objection to his egalitarian ethos, and could now appeal to feminism in response to Andrew Williams's publicity objection to this ethos. The article argues that Williams's objection is insufficient to rebut Cohen's ethos, inapplicable to variants of this ethos, and in conflict with plausible gender‐egalitarian ethoses. The article also advocates an understanding of basic structuralism and publicity consistent with feminism, and argues that Rawlsians need not reject plausible domestic egalitarian ethoses on either publicity or liberty grounds.

To Michèle, G. A. Cohen's Harriet Taylor

Feminists have long been aware of the pathology and the dangers of what are now termed “adaptive preferences.” Adaptive preferences are preferences formed in unconscious response to oppression. Thinkers from each wave of feminism continue to confront the problem of women's internalization of their own oppression, that is, the problem of women forming their preferences within the confining and deforming space that patriarchy provides. All preferences are, in fact, formed in response to a (more or less) limited set of options, but not all preferences are unconscious, pathological responses to oppression. Feminist theory therefore requires a method for distinguishing all preferences from adaptive or deformed preferences. Social contract theory provides such a tool. Social contract theory models autonomous preference‐acquisition and retention at both the external level of causation and the internal level of justification. In doing so, social contract theory exposes preferences that do not meet those standards, acting as both a conceptual test that identifies adaptive preferences and as a practical tool for personal and social clarification. A social contract approach helps persons and societies to identify and to confront preferences rooted in unconscious response to oppression.

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able‐mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are identified and interpreted through norms of able‐mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able‐mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy.

Feminist scholars have done much to identify oppressive forces within transnational commercial contract pregnancy and its social context that may coerce women into becoming gestational laborers. Feminists have also been careful not to depict gestational laborers as merely passive victims of oppression, though there is disagreement about the degree to which contract pregnancy offers opportunities for agency. In this article I consider how women who sell gestational labor may be agents against their oppression. I make explicit connections between resistance and judgment, which I will take to be a critically considered, intersubjective evaluative claim. Drawing on work by Jennifer Nedelsky and Hannah Arendt, my main argument will be that individual judgments can better enable oppressed persons to resist some aspects of their oppression, and that judgment helps to (further) develop agential capacities, in particular, the capacity for a person to be self‐constituting, to see herself as giving reasons for her own actions. I use Indian contract pregnancy as a case study to think through connections between resistance and judgment.

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.”

Female migrant workers are doubly disadvantaged in China's urban labor market because of their doubly marginalized identities as both women and rural residents. This article takes a process‐centered approach to explore how female migrants' two identity categories generate intersectional effects on their job‐search experiences in cities. Data from in‐depth interviews conducted in Xi'an city, China, in 2010 and 2011 reveal that three patterns of relationship explain the processes where the gender–hukou (residence status) intersection affects female migrants. In the first pattern, a splintering relationship, hukou and gender work singly to form employment discrimination against female migrants. The second, a contesting relationship, indicates that hukou and gender alternate as the primary identities that affect their employment opportunities. In the third, a collaborating relationship, hukou and gender work together to either positively or negatively shape female migrants' employment prospects. No matter which of the relationships plays out, female migrants' disadvantages as cheap urban laborers have become deeply entrenched in the urban labor market. This can be explained by two powerful social institutions in contemporary China, the hukou system and patriarchy.

How do we theorize the experiences of caregivers abused by their children with autism without intensifying stigma toward disability? Eva Kittay emphasizes examples of extreme vulnerability to overturn myths of independence, but she ignores the possibility that dependents with disabilities may be vulnerable and aggressive. Instead, her work over‐emphasizes caregivers' capabilities and the constancy of disabled dependents' vulnerability. I turn to Judith Butler's ethics and her conception of the self as opaque to rethink care amid conflict. Person‐centered planning approaches, pioneered by disability rights activists, merge Butler's analysis of opacity with Kittay's work on embodied care, while also inviting a broader network of people to both interpret needs and change communities. By expanding our conceptions of dependency, feminist disability studies can continue the aim of both Kittay and Butler: to humanize unintelligible lives.

The role of li, or ritual, in Confucianism is a perceived impediment to interpreting Confucianism to share a similar ethical framework with care ethics because care ethics is a form of moral particularism. I argue that this perception is false. The form of moral particularism promoted by care ethicists does not entail the abandonment of social conventions such as li. On the contrary, providing good care often requires employing systems of readily recognizable norms in order to ensure that care is successfully communicated and completed through one's care‐giving practices. I argue that li performs this communicative function well and that the early Confucians recommend breaching li precisely when its efficacy in performing this function is compromised.

Dominant Western discourses of motherhood have depicted disabled women as incapable of being mothers. In contrast to these representations, recent literature in disability studies has argued that disabled women can provide maternal care and should therefore retain custody over their children. This literature is commendable, but its emphasis on custodial rights excludes from the category of “mother” those disabled women who cannot maintain child custody. In this article, I challenge this exclusion via an account of my experience with my two mothers: my biological mother, who relinquished custody over me because of her inability to provide care, and my maternal grandmother, who raised me as her child. Theorizing this account, I argue that disability studies must adopt a conception of motherhood that recognizes both alternative kinship structures and mothers whose disabilities preclude them from fulfilling normative conceptions of maternal care. I develop such a conception by synthesizing Judith Butler's theorization of queer kinship with Donald Winnicott's rethinking of the maternal subject. I conclude by drawing on this flexible conception of motherhood to argue that my disabled mother's relinquishing of custody over me to her own mother was the very gesture in which she accepted and adopted a maternal role.

This article critiques Jack Halberstam's concept of queer failure through a feminist cripistemological lens. Challenging Halberstam's interpretation of Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher (Jelinek 1988) as a symbol of postcolonial angst rather than a figure of psychosocial disability, the article establishes a critical coalition between crip feminist theory and queer‐of‐color theory to promote a materialist politics and literal‐minded reading practice designed to recognize minority subjectivities (both fictional and in “real life”) rather than exploiting them for their metaphorical resonance. In asserting that Erika Kohut is better understood as a woman with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and in proposing borderline personality disorder as a critical optic through which to read both The Piano Teacher and The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam 2011), the article challenges the usual cultural undermining of epistemic authority that comes with the BPD diagnosis. It asserts instead that BPD might be a location of more, rather than less, critical acumen about the negative affects that accompany queer (and crip) failures, and reflect on what we might call a borderline turn in queer theory. On a broader level, the article joins an emergent conversation in crip theory about the reluctance of queer theory to address disability in meaningful and substantive ways.