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.

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.

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.

In this article, I explore some harms that emerge from the call for charity in academic philosophy. A charitability gap, I suggest, exists both between who we tend to read charitably and who we tend to expect charitability from. This gap shores up the disciplinary status quo and (re)produces epistemic oppression, which helps preserve philosophy's status as a discipline that is, to use Charles Mills's language, conceptually and demographically dominated by whiteness and maleness (Mills 1998, 2). I am particularly interested in calls for charity made in response to critiques of racist or sexist authors/texts. I suggest that in these cases, interpretive charity perpetuates epistemic violence by creating conditions for testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011); that it functions as an orientation device (Ahmed 2006) designed to bring “unruly” philosophers back in line with disciplinary practices and traditions; and that it requires resistant philosophers to remain in oppressive worlds (Lugones 2003a; Pohlhaus 2011). Although charitability is risky—and charity is disproportionately demanded from already marginalized philosophers—I am hesitant to abandon charity entirely. The outright rejection of charitable orientations toward texts or others commits philosophers to a purity politics that, following Alexis Shotwell, I suggest we resist (Shotwell 2016).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nineteenth-century US social activist contemporaries Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth are memorialized as women's rights pioneers. White activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony cemented a generational canon. Black activist Sojourner Truth anticipated the eventual crystallization of intersectionality. These figures’ historical proximity underscores the high epistemological and political stakes of claiming gendered categories, namely via “woman” as a mark of aggrievement. I link concepts of intersectionality, epistemic agency, epistemic resources, and social movement framing to examine how “woman” is asymmetrically categorized. To this end, I perform a textual analysis of memorialized documents: “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States” (1876) by Susan B. Anthony, and “Ain't I a Woman?” (1851) by Sojourner Truth. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony frame “woman” as a single-axis and vertical category, ultimately deferring to the seeming preeminence of the US nation-state. By contrast, Sojourner Truth frames “woman” as a multi-axis and horizontal category by synthesizing her feminist consciousness, lived experience of enslavement, and personal religiosity. This article revisits key memorialized events by utilizing a conceptual toolkit that interlaces feminist and social epistemology with social movement theory.

This article maps out a pedagogical juncture of bell hooks's feminist theory of homeplace (hooks 2007) and Indigenous maternal pedagogies as liberatory praxis through a journey with Indigenous women's literatures. I position this work as a response to the call to transform feminist theorizing through Indigenous philosophies as articulated in a recent Hypatia special issue (Bardwell-Jones and McLaren 2020, 2). The article documents hooks's theory of homeplace as a space of resistance and renewal and shares insights into Indigenous experiences of homeplace within historical and contemporary contexts of genocide, and the ongoing racialized and sexualized violence on Turtle Island. I discuss finding homeplace in Indigenous literatures by sharing a genealogy of Indigenous women's literatures as theorizing tools for engaging social change within academic spaces. To bring this work full circle, I offer Indigenous perspectives of homeplace, and the lessons gleaned from Indigenous women's literatures, as intentional work toward imagining Indigenous futurities. Indeed, connecting this work with liberatory pedagogical praxis imagines a site to establish homeplace in academic settings and empower students to engage in the kind of work that fosters and calls for safer homes, schools, and communities.

I write in solidarity with Chrystul Kizer, a criminalized Black teen survivor of sexual violence in Wisconsin, to detail how her ongoing legal fight occurs in a tilted sociopolitical and epistemological landscape with weighted opponents. I offer a theory of disparate failures of knowledge-attribution for survivors of sexual violence, a structural epistemological problem that I call constructed pragmatic encroachment (CPE). CPE explains that pragmatic encroachment is a nonneutral knowledge-attribution problem whereby attributors are empowered to affirm or deny a subject's knowledge-claim based on the subject's constructed practical stakes. Constructed practical stakes here refers to the potential costs/consequences of acting on knowledge of some p for some subject, “S,” constructed by their practical environment. Examining CPE in Kizer's self-defense case, I highlight why real-world pragmatic encroachment is exceptionally alarming for survivors of sexual violence, especially criminalized survivors. The epistemological problem is not merely whether people in powerful positions are frequently fallible, but the convergence of sociopolitical and epistemic power to deny what survivors know about our own experiences of violence, and power to punish survivors for acting on what we know.

Hobbes's justification for original maternal dominion is often evaluated in connection to the ambiguous status of women in his political thought. Many feminist interpreters explain this ambiguity as a contradiction: following Carole Pateman, they see maternal dominion as one term of the “paradox of parental power.” The first aim of this article is to elaborate a second, alternative approach within some critical responses to Pateman's reading. Rather than as one part of a contradiction, in these interpretations maternal dominion emerges as a self-standing form of authority that is very different from patriarchal domination. By offering a new synthesis of some of these interpretations, I aim to show this second view as more comprehensive and compelling than that offered by Pateman. Then, building upon this view, I give a new reading of the concept of preservation that establishes the mother's dominion as an intersubjective practice that reflects an awareness about the interdependent conditions for human well-being and, hence, challenges the standard approach to Hobbesian individualism and sovereign power. Finally, drawing from my interpretation of preservation, I offer a new way to understand Hobbes's argument that “parental authority is derived from the child's consent.”

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.

Starting from the early 2000s, India was one of the most sought-after destinations for commercial surrogacy. However, in 2015 the government decided to ban transnational commercial surrogacy, and recently “The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021,” which bans commercial surrogacy altogether and confines it to its altruistic form, has been enacted. Our article makes a philosophical intervention into the policy debate around this move by analyzing various draft versions of “The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill” which culminated in the ban. We argue that the Bill fails to realize its ethical potential since it is vitiated by a number of conceptual fallacies. We expose the conceptual fallacies by unpacking the concept of care in gestational surrogacy through the lens of care ethics. The robust conceptualization of care serves as a critical vantage point for analyzing the Bill's distorted understanding of care (and especially the affect–care–labor link) in gestational surrogacy. Consequently, we conclude that regulation of commercial surrogacy with fair compensation and due consideration for the agency of surrogates holds far greater ethical potential than a blanket ban on commercial surrogacy and mandating that it be practiced only in its altruistic form.

In the face of media attention that has recently spotlighted police brutality, racialized COVID-19 deaths, and the renewed visibility of white-supremacy groups, scholars, tech entrepreneurs, and media pundits are calling for an increase in empathy, claiming that it may move white and non-Black people of color beyond feelings of pity to dismantling anti-Black racism. However, in the context of anti-Blackness, is racial empathy possible? And what can we expect from it? Examining philosophical critiques of empathy's capabilities by philosophers and scholars engaged in feminist philosophy and Black studies, alongside Heidi Maibom's four-part definition of empathy, I focus on what empathy's limitations might tell us about the emotional and material structures that prevent empathy from achieving the results its advocates often hope for. I argue that the feelings of racial empathy, which may activate in empathy-inducing activities, may instead paradoxically point to the very anti-Black psychological structures that prevent empathetic action. I also contend that the feelings of racial empathy do not themselves undo the relations of anti-Blackness, but tracing the racism implicit in their activation may serve as a self-reflexive tool, an ongoing process, for understanding how anti-Blackness has shaped one's sense of self, embodied awareness, and lifeworld.

Burgeoning narratives of neurodivergence increase representation in media, producing an unprecedented visibility and awareness of what it means to be neurodivergent in a neurotypical world. In this article I examine the ways in which a neurodivergent subject position can provide liberatory insights into oppressive patriarchal gender structures, while exploring productive tensions of the histories and lineages of neurodivergence marked by inequities, erasure, and epistemic injustice (Catala et al. 2021). Although self-diagnosis is often accepted among communities, individuals without diagnosis face delegitimization in navigating institutions, accentuating race, class, and gender disparities. How do we honor a lineage of stories of neurodivergent individuals who could not claim this identity, and what does it mean to celebrate neurodiversity and simultaneously hold space and honor the absences marked by intersecting oppressions? Using Maria Lugones's world-traveling as a method, I reflect on these tensions via narratives of my own discovery of neurodivergence and diagnosis, contextualizing it within a larger lineage of neurodivergent family who do not identify as such, as well as my encounters with varying levels of access, privilege, and understanding. I position my autoethnographic analysis against anecdotes and discursive media of the neurodiversity movement, finding that an autistic subject position complicates both femininity and gender.

Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately deprived of perlocutionary influence on a conversation in which they are active participants, where perlocutionary influence on the conversation relates to speech-related perlocutionary goals meant to influence the conversation or conversational direction. Thus, this account grounds perlocutionary silencing in linguistic phenomena and characterizes perlocutionary silencing in a way that explains why those who experience perlocutionary silencing are harmed as speakers. Moreover, this account explains how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as conversational participants in a way that cannot be captured by illocutionary or locutionary silencing, for a speaker may be perlocutionarily silenced despite illocutionary success. Consequently, the account explains why “All Lives Matter” silences Black Lives Matter and “Not All Men” silences women sharing experiences of sexual harassment.

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.