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.

Much of the existing philosophical literature on BDSM focuses on questions about the ethics of BDSM. But there is an underlying question here regarding the nature of BDSM, one which remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, I take that metaphysical question to be prior to the normative one. In other words: it will be important to have a clear view of what BDSM is before we go on to evaluate it. Accordingly, this is a paper about the nature of BDSM and BDSM activities: what they are like, what makes them unique, and the ways in which these activities might be valuable. Here, I work from the philosophical literature on games to analyze structured erotic encounters (or “scenes”) in BDSM. In the first half of the paper, I argue that BDSM scenes are games, and that understanding them in this way yields important insights into the roles of agency, autonomy, and value in BDSM. In the second half of the paper, I map points of connection between this view of scenes-as-games and the existing literature on BDSM in sexual ethics, in order to illuminate the ways in which a moral evaluation of BDSM scenes might proceed from this analysis.

When philosophers consider factors compromising autonomy in consent, they often focus solely on the consent-giver's agential capacities, overlooking the impact of the consent-receiver's conduct on the consensual character of the activity. In this paper, I argue that valid consent requires justified trust in the consent-receiver to act only within the scope of consent. I call this the Trust Condition (TC), drawing on Katherine Hawley's commitment account of trust. TC constitutes a belief that the consent-receiver is capable and willing to act as we expect from them. If such trust is not warranted, I argue, consent lacks the appropriate normative grounds. After establishing TC, I explore its application in the sexual arena, asserting that, due to the non-contractual dimensions of sexual activity—such as the dynamic nature of sexual desires and the absence of external factors effectively binding sexual partners to the terms of consent—trust is warranted in sexual consent by means of care. I define care as a special sensitivity and attention toward the partner's will and discuss how this approach leads to safer intimate relationships in practice.

In this article, I revisit radical, cultural, and lesbian feminist manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Shulamith Firestone’s The dialectic of sex, the Radicalesbians’ “The woman-identified woman,” and “The fourth world manifesto” by Barbara Burris et al. I highlight a historical and political shift from the nonlinear temporality of the feminist revolution to the spatiality of women’s culture. This shift, overlapping with what feminist historian Alice Echols describes as “an eclipse of radical feminism” by cultural feminism, is symptomatic and indicative of an agential crisis emerging from the utopian drive of radical feminism. The failure or indefinite postponement of the feminist revolution pushed radical feminism toward the spatial politics of separatism, in which cultural and lesbian feminists found temporary yet sustainable refuge from a patriarchal society. The cultural feminist politics of the women’s space offered a utopian refuge for radical feminists whose desire for feminist revolution did not materialize. However, it initiated feminist hostility against transwomen, establishing a historical presage of the contemporary anti-trans feminist movement. In revisiting textual remnants of feminist history, this article critically intervenes with contemporary anti-trans feminist discourse that politically appropriates the cultural legacies of radical feminism in its essentialist tropes of “real women.”

Porphyry wrote an interpretation of a passage from the Odyssey under the title On the Cave of the Nymphs; this passage talks about a cave sacred to the water nymphs, which has two gates. Inside the cave, there are stone amphoras where bees store honey; stone looms where sea-purple clothes are woven, and a spring from where water flows ceaselessly. Porphyry interpreted this cave as a symbol of the cosmos; however, caves represent the womb of a goddess in the matriarchal tradition. In this paper, I aim to show how patriarchal transition takes place in Porphyry's interpretation of seeing caves as a symbol of the cosmos. From a philosophical perspective, I will also show that Porphyry attributes to the noetic principle a qualification which puts matter into form, while he sees matter as the source of ignorance, an attitude that is compatible to the feminist critique of reason in which rationality is associated with masculinity rather than femininity.

Should citizens have equal say regarding the running of society? Following the principles of democracy, and most of political philosophy: yes (at least at a fundamental level, thus allowing for representatives and the like). Indeed, comparing the main alternative seemingly supports this intuition. Epistocracy would instead give power just to the most epistemically competent. Testing citizens’ political and economic knowledge looks likely to disproportionately disempower marginalized groups, making the position seem like a non-starter and democracy the clear winner. Nevertheless, this paper argues against giving citizens equal say, or at least, it offers the strongest possible motivation for this position. In particular, I introduce the progressive case for epistocracy, and what I term standpoint epistocracy. This account refigures the relevant notion of political competence such that it is not the most privileged classes who would likely constitute our epistocracy, but rather, the least. The resulting picture considerably improves on traditional versions of epistocracy and also democracy.

When people reach for symbolic language like metaphor in an effort to express their understanding of a complex experience like baby and pregnancy loss it is usually because everyday language is inadequate. We demonstrate how an analysis of people’s accounts of stillbirth, miscarriage and termination for fetal anomaly collected in England suggests a variety of explanations for “what remains” after pregnancy loss. These include bodily traces, ashes, symbolic objects, and social relationships: a range indicative of the different physical, material, and affective elements that inform how a person understands bodily and temporal separation after pregnancy loss. We engage with the work of feminist philosophers who critique models of pregnant embodiment; those who propose parthood, and theorists who argue for more complex models of intercorporeal relationality. We then discuss insights from linguistics about embodied cognition and metaphorical language. Paying critical attention to symbolic language, combined with feminist thinking about intercorporeality, offers a methodology for analyzing the embodied metaphors that people use when they talk about their experiences of pregnancy loss. These articulations about “what remains” support our claim that the intercorporeal model of embodiment should be extended spatially and temporally beyond the moment of physical separation following pregnancy loss.

This study analyzes Jane Addams’ contribution to an enduring topic: how marginalized people join the public from beyond political, socioeconomic, cultural, and gendered barriers. I study Addams’ book, The Long Road of Woman's Memory (1916), which discusses the seemingly irrational devil baby case in Chicago. Using the concept of public and hidden transcripts and the method of cultural discourse analysis, I contextualize the book within the theorizing around the concept of the public by Addams’ contemporaries, Gabriel Tarde and Robert E. Park. The analysis shows that Addams’ discussion aligns with three conceptual aspects of the formation of the public. First, Addams describes the awakening of consciousness about a collectively relevant concern, and second, the emergence of interaction about the topic. Third, Addams constructs a conceptual distinction between two functions of memory, highlighting independent critical judgment as the divider between the two, which is the decisive factor that Park argues distinguishes the public from the crowd. Addams’ writing contains an unusual perspective in that she discusses development toward the formation of something like the public in a marginalized communicative culture. Instead of focusing on performative and dramatic public debate, Addams addresses discreet genres of communication and illustrates their public relevance.

The oversight of Chinese feminist traditions in transnational feminist discourse is remarkable given China’s historical importance and vast population. Despite historical suppression by Confucianism, Chinese feminisms emerged at the turn of the last century, drawing from Marxist, anarchist, and liberal movements. While scholars increasingly recognize overlooked female thinkers like Ban Zhao, contemporary discussions of China often revolve around reconciling Confucianism and feminism. This tendency underscores the perception of Chinese feminism as a derivative of Western feminism, where modern thinkers reject local culture for transnational movements. This paper contends that Chinese feminists, including Kang Youwei and He-Yin Zhen, remained deeply rooted in their traditions. While Kang incorporated foreign ideas to advocate for feminist goals and modernize society, he predominantly engaged with traditional philosophy to address its sexist elements. Similarly, He-Yin’s anarcho-feminist approach integrated Western influences to engage with traditional Chinese thought rather than rejecting it outright. By examining prevalent gender and selfhood concepts in traditional Chinese thought, this paper elucidates the notion of “correlative sexism,” and argues that women were not primarily regarded as a “second sex” as described by Simone de Beauvoir. The paper then demonstrates how Kang and He-Yin responded to this sexist discourse, offering novel perspectives on women’s liberation and societal reform.

The relation between epistemic relativism and epistemic oppression is contentious but undertheorized. Both positions rest on one or the other version of the situated knowledge thesis, based on the idea that access to and justification of knowledge is dependent on a particular context or, to be precise, an epistemic system. Whether this notion is coextensive in both schools of thought is, however, unclear. In this article, I aim to examine the relation between epistemic relativism and epistemic oppression by analyzing the notion of “epistemic system.” Through this analysis, I shall argue that the epistemic relativism literature has neglected power imbalances within epistemic systems since it rests on idealizing epistemic systems to sets of epistemic principles. Understanding epistemic systems as necessarily social and political, I then confront the idea formulated in the epistemic oppression literature that some forms of oppression are “irreducibly epistemic.” I argue that epistemic principles can never fully determine their applications and thus essentially require the social. Thus, insisting on the “irreducibly epistemic” might not be a favorable option for epistemic oppression or epistemic relativism scholarship.

In this paper I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth-century France. Although forgotten after her death, Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but with very few notable exceptions, her philosophical work is still in the margins. In addressing this gap in the literature, I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of ideas, particularly focusing on her contribution to process epistemologies. I argue that Germain was a truly transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre and that her philosophical work should be mapped in the wider field of process philosophies. In doing so I make connections between Sophie Germain and Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, particularly focusing on their take on feelings, prehensions, happy ideas, and events.

In this paper, I examine some of the emotional dimensions of oppression under the heading of “emotional alienation.” If the experience of oppression is affectively attuned, then resisting oppression will likely involve dealing with these difficult, often painful, feelings. Resistance may require finding ways of pushing back against their potentially disempowering effects and developing other, more empowering, ways of feeling. Long-lasting forms of social oppression have a strong hold in people’s sense of self. Resistance, then, requires self-transformation. If emancipation requires undoing disempowering emotional patterns, then self-transformation will require “undoing” ourselves. How is this undoing tied to developing a new consciousness? How does developing a “radically altered consciousness” (Bartky 1990) involve radically changing our ways of feeling? In this paper, I will argue that emotional disalienation need not be thought of in terms of suppressing or excising disempowering emotional patterns. I will contend that narrative thinking, as a relational process, can play an effective role in the struggle towards emancipation.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize how the wave narrative maintains and reinforces the hegemony of Western-dominant feminisms while silencing, excluding, appropriating, and/or diluting Othered feminisms and gender-related perspectives. As Western-dominant feminist historicizations travel to the wave narrative, they become the points of reference to all, while Othered historicizations are either erased or Westernized and whitewashed as they travel to the wave narrative. First, to present these problematizations, I will articulate with Edward Said’s travelling theories, Santiago Castro-Gómez’s zero-point hubris, and Linda Alcoff’s speaking for the other. Secondly, I will argue the wave narrative is embedded in Western myths that reinforce its supremacy, including the myths of: (i) true-universal feminisms; (ii) neutral locus of enunciation; (iii) linear-progressive feminist historicization; and (iv) white feminist savior. Finally, I seek to contribute with the theoretical perspectives presented in this paper by focusing on: (1) the importance of understanding from-to/how-by theories and historicizations travel; (2) how Othered epistemologies are located, according to zero-point hubris logics, within hyper-surveilled points of no-observation; and (3) how the dilution and appropriation of Othered stories and epistemologies by Western-dominant feminisms is not simply speaking for Others, but speaking above Others.

Caleb Ward interviews Black feminist writer, poet, educator, organizer, and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Audre Lorde’s spirituality, her ecological political praxis, her pedagogy, and the cross-generational scale of social change.

This paper considers the practical application of the metaphor of “good boundaries” for working towards better interspecies relationships and multispecies cultures. Engaged philosophical methods are employed in the context of the author’s family farm with attentiveness towards both multispecies and colonial politics. The analysis centers interspecies relational dynamics across a spectrum of liminal forms of life on “the property,” in the “homestead,” and under the guise of “stewardship.” The paper concludes that the metaphor of good boundaries helps to generate better multispecies entanglements by (i) growing our capacity for ecological thinking, (ii) directing our attention to moral failure, and, at times, (iii) disrupting anthropocentric colonial ideologies and practices.

In my examination of Sophocles’ Antigone, I use Beauvoir’s existential philosophy as a lens and hermeneutic model and apply her language and terms—immanence, transcendence, and ambiguity—to the original ancient text to understand the gendered metaphors of the play and to reveal an area of oversight in her superficial treatment of the tragedy. Taking this theoretical approach, I use “feminist” or “existentialist” Beauvoir (The ethics of ambiguity, The second sex) against herself, that is, her interpretation of the Antigone in “Moral idealism and political realism,” to show how existentialist freedom is achieved in the tragedy. In my reading, I cast Antigone as a figure of ambiguity, situated in an oppressive context, and I argue that she creates her own project and strives towards freedom, in the Beauvoirian sense. I also extend the subjectivity of ambiguity to Ismene and illustrate the course of her own existential freedom to portray the reversibility of the transcendence/immanence polarity in these two figures and, ultimately, to suggest that the sisters are intertwined. Inscribing my reading in a tradition of feminist interpretations surrounding the Antigone, I advance a new reading that finds in the play a feminist political theory of existentialism, inclusive of the sororal pair.

Sex work is highly gendered, with 80 percent of sex workers being female, and the vast majority of buyers of sex being male. It is often taken for granted that this is how it is, and implicit in much of the debate around sex work is the assumption that it is inherently gendered. In this paper, I question this assumption, drawing on sociological research to challenge arguments which purport that it is inconceivable that women would ever want to pay for sex, or that sex work would exist under conditions of gender equality. I argue that gendered sexual norms likely are a significant reason for why sex work is so gendered, but sex work would probably continue to exist under conditions of gender equality, due to the diversity in motivations people have for buying and selling sex. Acknowledging that sex work is not inherently gendered is important for (at least) two reasons. First, it is probable that the gendered nature of sex work contributes to the stigma and bad treatment that sex workers, particularly female ones, face. Secondly, if sex work is not inherently gendered, this will have implications for how we should think about it, morally, practically, and legally.

In their recent book, Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics, Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek reconstruct Hannah Arendt's concept of natality in order to diagnose and resist biopolitical threats to democratic plurality. Their analysis leads them to engage indigenous reproductive justice organizing; that engagement is the focus of my critique. I argue that their understanding of the biopolitical targeting of indigenous people needs further development. Diprose and Ziarek tend to read indigenous organizers as working toward inclusion in the democratic plurality of settler societies. While that is the aim of some indigenous organizations and actors, that is not the aim of many, including a theorist and activist they engage, Katsi Cook (Mohawk). I suggest that their engagement with indigenous reproductive justice organizing is shaped by the important, but unthematized role settler colonialism has in Arendt's work. I further argue that Cook provides crucial theoretical and practical challenges to the settler state and its role in feminist theoretical projects of critique.

During the early 1970s, the Italian feminist movement opened up to foreign militant contexts. The two crucial interplays were with the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. The aim of this article is to analyze from a transnational historical perspective the connection between Milanese activists and the French group Psychanalyse et politique led by Antoinette Fouque, which developed through several encounters during a period of a few days. From the French militants, the Milanese women learnt the political practice of unconscious which differed from the more diffuse consciousness-raising technique. From those meetings I reflect on general issues linked to the Italian and French feminist movements of that time: for instance, viewing the women’s separatist communal life both as a response to the New Left’s refusal to take on the peculiarity of women’s oppression and as the positive exemplification of the deconstructive claim that the personal is political. I also consider the contrast between the use of psychoanalysis and consciousness-raising practices, the significance of orality as a feminist means of communication, and the relationship between orality and the later trend of feminist bookshops. The ultimate goal is to understand the political effectiveness and limitations of the transnational feature of those encounters.

This paper engages with a series of recent literatures that examine how feminist and queer movements have become agents of nationalism, neoliberalism, and global wars. I argue that, while the critique of intersectionality has attempted to curtail the reproductions of such violence within feminism, it too has not been able to resist cooptations into nationalist and capitalist forms of power. Developing an epistemological critique of intersectionality, I arrive at an analysis of identity politics as an elemental identification with phallic power that erases the feminine. Building on the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Wendy Brown, and Luce Irigaray, I suggest that at the core of such feminist alliances with domination lies an unresolved relation to feminine desire as the desire for a non-identitarian politics.