Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poetic-maternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume.

This article discusses three main orientations in recent works of legal and political theory about the family—contract-based, community-based, and rights-based—and argues that none of these takes adequate account of two paradoxical features of family life and of the family's relationship to the state. A coherent political and legal theory of the family in the contemporary United States requires recognition of the relational rights and responsibilities intrinsic to family life.

Political agency is vital to the formulation of a feminist politics so feminists have attempted to create a subject that eschews the sexism of the Cartesian subject while at the same time retaining agency. This paper examines some of the principal feminist attempts to reconstitute the subject along these lines. It assesses the success of these attempts in light of the question of whether the subject is a necessary component of feminist theory and practice.

On realist terms, politics is about power, security, and order, and the question of whether politics can practice compassion is irrelevant. The author argues that a politics of compassion is possible and necessary in order to address human security needs. She extend debates on care ethics to develop a politics of compassion, using the example of asylum seekers to demonstrate that politics can practice compassion with (1) attentiveness to the needs of vulnerable people who are suffering, (2) an active listening to the voices of the vulnerable, and (3) open, compassionate, and appropriate responses to particular needs.

The deliberative turn in political philosophy sees theorists attempting to ground democratic legitimacy in free, rational, and public deliberation among citizens. However, feminist theorists have criticized prominent accounts of deliberative democracy, and of the public sphere that is its site, for being too exclusionary. Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib show that deliberative democrats generally fail to attend to substantive inclusion in their conceptions of deliberative space, even though they endorse formal inclusion. If we take these criticisms seriously, we are tasked with articulating a substantively inclusive account of deliberation. I argue in this article that enriching existing theories of deliberative democracy with Fricker's conception of epistemic in/justice yields two specific benefits. First, it enables us to detect instances of epistemic injustice, and therefore failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces. Second, it can act as a model for constructing deliberative spaces that are more inclusive and therefore better able to ground democratic legitimacy.

In this article, Bailey analyzes the relationship between ethical vegetarianism (or the claim that ethical vegetarianism is morally right for all people) and white racism (the claim that white solipsistic and possibly white privileged ethical claims are imperialistically or insensitively universalized over less privileged human lives). This plays out in the dreaded comparison of animals with people of color and Jews as exemplified in the PETA campaign and the need for human identification (or solidarity) with animals in ethical vegetarianism. To support the viability of ethical vegetarianism, Bailey resolves the dread of this comparison by locating ethical vegetarianism as a strategy of resistance to classist, racist, heterosexist, and colonialist systems of power that often rely on the assumptions of speciesism to ground these axes of oppression. The author carries out this argument to contextualize African American responses to animal welfarism and ethical vegetarianism.

In this article I will revisit the question of what I term the continuum of heteronormative sexual interactions, that is, the idea that purportedly ethically acceptable heterosexual interactions are conceptually, ethically, and politically associated with instances of sexual violence. Spurred by recent work by psychologist Nicola 2005, I conclude that some of my earlier critiques of Catharine MacKinnon's theoretical linkages between sexual violence and normative heterosex are wanting. In addition, neither MacKinnon's theory nor my critique of it seem up to the task of providing an ethical account of the examples of “unjust sex” that Gavey has described. I come to the conclusion that an ethical analysis of sexual interactions requires a focus on sexual desire, but that desire cannot take on the by now heavily criticized role of consent. Rather than looking for the presence or absence of sexual desire prior to sexual encounters as a kind of ethical certification of them, we ought instead to focus on the efficacy of that sexual desire, that is, its ability (or lack thereof) to shape an encounter in substantial and meaningful ways.

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?

Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”

This paper explores the conditions under which feminine beautification constitutes a feminist practice. Distinguishing between the process and product of beautification allows us to isolate those aesthetic, interapos;Subjective, and embodied elements that empower rather than disempower women. The empowering characteristics of beautification, however, are difficult and perhaps impossible to represent in a sexist context; therefore, while beautifying may be a positive experience for women, being viewed as a beautified object in current Western society is almost always opposed to women's equality and autonomy.

Recent literature portrays caring as a psychological, social, and ethical orientation associated with female gender identity. This essay focuses on Giliigan's influential view that “care” is a broad theme of moral development which is under-represented in dominant theories of human development such as Kohlberg's theory. An alternative hypothesis is proposed portraying care development as a set of circumscribed coping strategies tailored to dealingwith sexism. While these strategies are practically effective and partially “liberated,” from the moral point of view, they also reflect the debilitating influences of sexist socialization even at the highest level. Gilligan and her colleagues seem to misidentify these inadequacies of mature care. This alternative hypothesis is briefly related to the critical and feminist tradition. Then it is supported with Gilligan's own research and interpretive text.

This article begins by examining the importance that critical intercultural dialogues have within the Modernity/Coloniality Research Program toward reaching an alternative geopolitics and body‐politics of knowledge, in order to raise the question whether the colonial difference creates conditions for dialogical situations that bring together critiques of coloniality emerging from different experiences of coloniality. The answer it offers is twofold. On the one hand, if one imagines such situations to be communicative exchanges à la Bakhtin that put logos at the center, given what is termed the coloniality of language and speech, the possibility of such exchanges is feasible only as an abstract gesture. On the other hand, when one faces the complications of the erasure of dialogue produced by coloniality, the kind of decolonial communicative relations that seem possible among people thinking and acting from the colonial difference are less conscious or agential than emotive. By articulating the relations between coalitional methodologies (María Lugones) and a global sense of connection (Édouard Glissant) the article proposes a nondialogical theory of decolonial communication: a way of orienting ourselves with a sense of permeability and recognition of being on the same side that doesn't need to be politically motivated but is always active.

Trans of Color inclusion is not simply a gesture of affectionate commitment to María Lugones's theory of impure communities. Rather, it is required for the enactment of her liberatory theory within and across communities of color. While María Lugones's historico-theoretical analysis of the colonial/modern gender system relies upon anthropological citations of Native gender and sexual diversity, she argues that we must bracket gender for the benefit of [cis]women of color feminisms. However, if this bracketing does not first carefully uncover cisgender histories of violence, then this decolonial feminist praxis reinscribes the invisibility of transphobia, racism, and colonialism's violent intersections, performing another mode of erasure and silence on Trans, Two-Spirit, and Nonbinary Native, Black, and Latinx peoples. In placing Lugones's texts into conversation with the voices of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color theorists, I argue that the mutilation of trans flesh makes possible the integration of [cis]People of Color into the gender–sex binary even if as failures. More important, this essay offers the beginnings of a phenomenological account of Trans World-Traveling, where the unruliness of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color bodies cocoons decolonial worlds from within the spiraling folds of abject flesh—always already in infra-communication with ancestral pasts, presents, and futures.

This article critically assesses the different ways of theoretically connecting feminism, capitalism, and ecology. I take the existing tradition of socialist ecofeminism as my starting point and outline two different ways that the connections among capitalism, the subordination of women, and the destruction of the environment have been made in this literature: materialist ecofeminism and Marxist ecofeminism. I will demonstrate the political and theoretical advantages of these positions in comparison to some of the earlier forms of theorizing the relationship between women and nature, but I will also submit them to philosophical critique. I will show how the Marxist ecofeminist position needs to be both updated and revised in order to account for the different, sometimes contradictory mechanisms for the capitalization of nature that have become prominent today. I will underscore two developments in particular: the dominance of neoliberalism and the development of biotechnology. I will conclude by summing up the theoretical grounds on which a contemporary political alliance between feminist and ecological struggles against capitalism can be built.

Virtually nonexistent in traditional American Indian communities, today American Indian women and children experience family violence at rates similar to those of the dominant culture. This article explores violence within American Indian communities as an expression of internalized oppression and as an extension of EurO'American violence against American Indian nations.

In recent years, critics of modern obstetrics have cited technology as responsible for women's discontent regarding childbirth. In this essay, I investigate and pry apart the connection between the quality of childbirth experience and technology. After identifying three factors considered constitutive of a ‘good birth,’ I demonstrate how technology can either facilitate or hinder each, but how dominant strains of birthing practice that reinforce female shame (hospital-based obstetrics and midwifery) consistently undermine them all. It is not technology per se, but its sensitive application, which may most effectively promote an optimal and affirming birth experience.

I explore the ethics of altering the body of a child with severe cognitive disabilities in such a way that keeps the child “forever small.” The parents of Ashley, a girl of six with severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, in collaboration with her physicians and the Hospital Ethics Committee, chose to administer growth hormones that would inhibit her growth. They also decided to remove her uterus and breast buds, assuring that she would not go through the discomfort of menstruation and would not grow breasts. In this way she would stay “forever small” and be able to be carried and handled by family members. They claimed that doing this would ensure that she would be able to be part of the family and of family activities and to have familial care. But the procedure has raised thorny ethical questions. I wish to explore these questions philosophically by bringing to bear my own experiences as a mother of a grown daughter with severe cognitive impairments.

In this paper I discuss the interrelated topics of stereotype threat and attributional ambiguity as they relate to gender and gender identity. The former has become an emerging topic in feminist philosophy and has spawned a tremendous amount of research in social psychology and elsewhere. But the discussion, at least in how it connects to gender, is incomplete: the focus is only on cisgender women and their experiences. By considering trans women's experiences of stereotype threat and attributional ambiguity, we gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena and their problematic effects.1

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of “dialogue” with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called “hypothetical construction,” in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of the differences of others.

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.