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 answering my undergraduate students’ questions about what I do, I keep coming back to the term structural epistemology. If some students push me further to not hide behind terms, I tell them: I study structures (social, political, and cultural institutions and arrangements)—not all of them at the same time, obviously—and what they do to our knowledge practices (what we know and how we know). And I give some examples: how refugee regimes know “persecution,” I tell them, matters, particularly for asylum seekers. I also tell them that mine is a kind of structural epistemology guided by structural concerns in women of color feminist theories. This essay is a long way of answering the question: What do I do when I do structural epistemology? I consider this question to be an important one not only as part of an effort to rethink what I take myself to be doing in professional philosophy but also as an effort to characterize commitments and strategies I am influenced by and work with as a structural epistemologist.

Finding myself having to look after a mother grown old and infirm, the dilemmas in the practice of care as a moral value have been sharply foregrounded—for this is a mother with whom I have clashed my entire life. Though typically taken for granted at the time, there is no denying the enduring effect of the care provided by a dedicated mother. But, over the years, this has become fissured by an acute sense of dismay, with the gradual realization that her solicitude formed part of an earnestly held, conservative, moralized gender position, which I grew to reject. Her dependence on and recognition of me as a daughter arouse intense emotions, but equally intense are the anger and resentment arising out of her stubborn refusal to even consider the difference between her and my conceptions of woman. Though agitated and alienated by this obstinacy, I find myself, nevertheless, bound to this unfreedom of geriatric care.

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.

In this interview with Kathryn Sophia Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines), Edward O'Byrn discusses Belle's publications from 2010–2017. His questions focus on Simone de Beauvoir and her use of analogy in The Second Sex, along with broader questions that engage Belle's work on existential philosophy, Beauvoir, Black feminism, and intersectionality.

Indigenous language activists talk about incommensurability all the time—in interesting ways that link language and knowledge as components of Indigenous lifeways that can't be disentangled. According to many of these scholar-activists, what is untranslatable about Indigenous languages is often what is incommensurate about Indigenous worlds. Drawing upon resources from Indigenous language-reclamation work, I outline here a nonexhaustive taxonomy of incommensurability in the literature about Indigenous philosophy of language, and gesture at the ways coalitional relationships might be built that hold space for these different varieties of incommensurability. For ease of explication and to honor Indigenous ways of knowing, I employ here an organizational metaphor rooted in my own communities’ traditions of canoe-voyaging to organize three forms of incommensurability that emerge from Indigenous philosophies of language: impassable incommensurability and strategic impassable incommensurability (big water through a rock garden), as well as incommensurability with technical passage: (heavy water through a rock garden). These forms of incommensurability, as they spring from Indigenous philosophies of language, lend themselves toward nuanced insights for careful and considerate world-traveling (à la Lugones) that holds space for epistemic and linguistic sovereignty.

I've been thinking quite a lot of late about how, as a settler, I can more fully and effectively support Indigenous peoples struggling for climate justice. In the process, I've found Andrea Sullivan-Clarke's recent insights about decolonizing allyship most helpful. After offering a brief summary of the necessary and sufficient conditions Sullivan-Clarke identifies for decolonizing allyship, I reflect on how I personally can strive to meet these conditions while remaining aware that—like my recovery from alcoholism—my work will never be complete.

The topic of vulnerability has been the subject of intense scholarly interest and work, especially in feminist theory. It circulates in academic and nonacademic contexts, spans many disciplines, including both applied fields and highly theoretical ones, and in philosophy in particular has been taken up in multiple subfields and approaches to the discipline. The concept's widespread appeal might stem from the sense that vulnerability is intensifying, or at least from a heightened awareness of it.1 In any case, vulnerability's salience lies in how it names something significant about the world and suggests different ways that something ought to be addressed. That is, vulnerability's appeal lies in its normative pertinence or efficacy, in how the concept seems to hold the possibility of both diagnosing ethical failures and forging different, more adequate ethical responses to the injustices we witness and/or face.

This article differentiates between standpoints, intersectionality, intersectional standpoints, and identity politics. It argues that although there is no necessary connection between intersectionality and ethics, the intersectional standpoints of the oppressed do epistemic, ethical, and political work. To make this argument it uses a case study that takes the form of an analysis of mainstream arguments for denying public assistance to the working-class undocumented from an intersectional standpoint of that group. This paper also addresses two substantial criticisms of intersectional standpoints, including the charge that identity-politics-based intersectional standpoints foster victimhood politics and undermine class-based struggles.

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.