Feminists have long argued that emotions have a rightful place in politics. Anger, specifically, is often said to play a crucial role in alerting people to oppression and motivating resistance. The task of this paper is to elaborate these claims and to outline a conception of the political value of anger. In doing so, I argue against the view that anger is valuable only if and because it expresses a sound moral judgment. Instead, we should see rage, in the first place, as simply a response to having one's practical aims in the world thwarted—there need be nothing moral or righteous about this feeling for it to have political potential. Second, unlike those who highlight anger's connection with love or claims for equal dignity, I emphasize its tendency towards aggression. With this non-moralized conception of anger in hand, we can see how rage reveals practical problems in a way that can spur on a dialectical process of political articulation and organized action. The resulting standpoint from which one can articulate and resist one's oppression based on one's rage is not inherent in the experience of anger—rather, it needs to be seen as a political achievement in itself.

This paper reflects on representations of the convergence of Islam and feminism in light of the recent uprising of Iranian women. Most of the existing literature discussing Muslim women’s rights are locked in a dichotomy of approaches, one being prejudicial and the other apologetic. The prejudicial approach is a (neo-)Orientalist one. It understands Muslim societies as backward and their redemption in abandoning Islam and following the lead of the “West.” The apologetic approach is a multiculturalist one, advocating most prominently by academic feminists based in Europe and United States. In trying to reclaim agency for Muslim women, this approach denies real oppressions happening in Muslim societies, and as a result of Islamic practices. Inspired by Iranian women’s fight for freedom, this paper challenges the aforementioned dichotomy, and instead calls for a third approach that begins with, and responds to, the lived experiences of women living in Muslim societies.

This article examines the figure of the female intellectual exemplified in Anna Maria van Schurman, as she is portrayed in the catalogues of learned women. The aim is to demonstrate the dramatic and unexpected changes that this persona undergoes during the eighteenth century. The article challenges the common misconception that gender roles progress throughout history towards an ideal of freedom and equality. Instead, I argue that we see a regression in the eighteenth century where the ideal of female intellectuality transforms from focusing on gender-neutral virtues such as academic skill and learnedness to emphasizing traditionally feminine traits like modesty, piety, and domesticity. The first part of the article introduces the genre of catalogues of learned women, focusing on the German context. The main part presents an in-depth analysis of the biographical entries on van Schurman, juxtaposing the early eighteenth-century portrayals with entries from the turn of the nineteenth century. The purpose of this analysis is to illustrate the radical discursive changes concerning women intellectuals by using van Schurman as case study. Finally, the last part of the article will be dedicated to a discussion of historical conceptualizations of womanhood, exploring why the gender narrative changed in the early modern period.

Catcalls have been said to insult, intimidate, and silence their targets. The harms that catcalls inflict on individuals are reason enough to condemn them. This paper argues that they also inflict a type of structural harm by subordinating their targets. Catcalling initiates an unwanted conversation where none should exist. This brings the rules and norms governing conversations to bear in such a way that the catcall assigns their target a “subordinate discourse role.” This not only constrains the behavior of the target here and now, but also influences the norms governing future conversations. Catcalls are then not only bad because of the effects on their target, but also because of their pernicious contribution to the wider normative landscape.

Building on Linda Martín Alcoff's analysis of subversive speech in Rape and resistance, Lori Gruen's account of entangled empathy, and what Susan Brison calls the remaking of self in Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self, we introduce subversive listening as a way to resist obstacles to empathetic listening after sexual violence. Specifically, we identify and aim to interrupt five overextended frameworks (legal, medical, academic, fixing, and identifying) that commonly obstruct empathetic listening. To demonstrate the practical value of our work, we conclude by showing how a reader might avoid these overextensions when engaging with V's (formerly Eve Ensler) The apology.

According to the Laozi one of the ways to cultivate and grasp Dao is through “remaining female” and “nourishing the mother.” The term mother is used in reference to the beginning of all existence—“the mother of all under heaven,” “the mother of all existences.” The mother is both an active force of generation and the concreteness of the generated beings. In this sense, the feminine attribute of motherhood is a living embodiment of Dao. In the world of myriad phenomena, the mother provides a location of interaction between “absence” and “presence,” between wu and you. In this paper, I suggest an analysis of the metaphor of mother and other “feminine roles” in early Daoist thought through a textual examination of the Laozi. Considering the intellectual background in Warring States period China in which the common understanding of the universe and all phenomena is revealed through the interactions of correlative and complementary forces, the esteem of one over the other—the feminine over the male, the mother over father—is outstanding and deserves serious investigation. The question is what can we learn from the feminine, what can femininity teach us about the world, its generation, and even political practice?

In this article, I discuss some ways in which my experience, as a sexual assault survivor, has often been disregarded. It was disregarded when it occurred, by a crowd of people who watched. It has also been disregarded, however, in certain sorts of conversations—that occur within feminist communities—about sexual violence. The latter forms of disregard stem from the fact that I am male, and so do not fit many peoples’ preconceptions about survivors of sexual assault. After discussing these different forms of disregard and how they relate, I raise some difficult questions concerning whether, and how, conversations about sexual violence should make room for experiences like mine. In closing, I propose tentative, schematic answers to those questions.

The need for gender recognition is widespread, even when hypervisibility and other effects of trans antagonism make that need dangerous for trans people. This reason partially accounts for why, in trans critique, recognition is a dirty word. As a political aim, and to some extent as a moral norm, trans critiques encourage dropping recognition. On the other hand, social philosophers often view recognition as a solution to misrecognition and take recognition to be a remedy for injustice. In my view, recognition should neither be dropped nor held as a foundational norm for trans emancipation. First, I present three ways trans recognition is ambivalent. Second, evaluating Axel Honneth's observations about the entwinement of recognition and domination, I argue that recognition is an ambivalent norm for trans critique and struggle. Third, I propose studying trans recognitive practices (rather than recognition in abstract) and I illuminate what might set trans/t4t recognition acts apart from their cis-grounded analogues, centering the roles of the body and space/place as resources of trans/t4t recognitive practices, and how such practices focus on the subject's change and becoming over their identification.

Without females included in the ranks of political founder, Hannah Arendt's theory of political beginning looks dangerously romanticized. Arendt's founder is someone who rises to the challenge of their times, diverting history and renewing public spirit in the process. But despite a methodology that called for recovering the “rich and strange” from the past Arendt does not address the female founders that populate the myths and traditions she cites as instructive. These figures exemplify the unsettling forces and relationality she associates with beginning, but they also signal the high cost of action for the marginalized, including the difficulty some actors face in being recognized at all. If, as she suggests, the founder's persona provides an avenue of recall for the perplexing experience of beginning, then female founders support this recall magnificently while adding a tragic and troubling note that Arendt omits. Their reintroduction into her theory of political beginning takes the shine off her otherwise heroized and happy account.

Comparative studies have identified “Antigone's sisters” across the globe, excepting for Southeast Asia. Yet in Vietnam, there exists Kiều, the protagonist in Nguyễn Du's The Tale of Kiều, whose cultural significance is comparable to Antigone. What insights can be gained about feminist political power by comparing Antigone to Kiều? Proposing a shift in focus on Kiều and Antigone's love from the questions of who and why to how, the paper argues that their love shares three fundamental commonalities related to their living conditions, actions, and choices. First, they are women who live a life full of love in worlds where love is forbidden. Secondly, they are women who practice love during dark times. And third, they choose to love in unconventional ways, and in doing so, they engender possibilities, particularly in terms of contemplating the interplay between life, death, and freedom. This analysis demonstrates a multiplicity of women's love and the experiences that possess a transcultural dimension, one that signals a type of harmony in the resistance of war through love. Therefore, Antigone and Kiều represent a different direction of a feminist world-building project—that of constructing a world through love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.