This paper argues that the concept of care is significant not only for ethics, but for epistemology as well. After elucidating caring as a five-step dyadic relation, I go on to show its epistemic significance within the general framework of virtue epistemology as developed by Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and Linda Zagzebski. The notions of “care-knowing” and “care-based epistemology” emerge from construing caring (respectively) as a reliabilist and responsibilist virtue.

This article considers María Lugones's concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and resistance despite the lack of institutional endorsement. I engage the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Denise Oliver, and other scholars who offer methodologies and discourses on recognition, witnessing, and resistance. I argue that the feminist philosophical concept of faithful witnessing is a critical element of reading decolonial imaginaries. The article undertakes close readings of two novels in the Afro‐Latinx and Afro‐Hispanic tradition: Donato Ndongo's Shadows of Your Black Memory and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In these readings, the concept of faithful witnessing enriches the analysis of religious colonization and the gender violence inherent to coloniality.

Canada's Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies rejects all forms of surrogacy arrangement under the rubric of objecting to commercial surrogacy. Noncommercial surrogacy arrangements, however, can be defended against the commission's objections. They can be viewed as cases of giving a benefit or service to another in a way that expresses benevolence, and establishes a relationship between surrogates and prospective ‘social’ parents that allows mutual understanding and reciprocal personal interaction between them.

In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.

Most Third World feminists consider nationalism as detrimental to feminism. Against this general trend, I argue that “polycentric” nationalism has potentials for advocating feminist causes in the Third World. “Polycentric” nationalism, whose proper goal is the attainment and maintenance of national self-determination, is still relevant in this neocolonial age of capitalist globalization and may serve feminist purposes of promoting the well-being of the majority of Third World women who suffer disproportionately under this system.

This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance that seek to reclaim and celebrate them.

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel's notion of the natural attitude about sex and his claim that it is fundamentally moral in nature. The author looks beneath the natural attitude in order to explain its peculiar resilience and oppressive force. There she reveals a moral order grounded in the dichotomously sexed bodies so constituted through boundaries governing privacy and decency. In particular, naked bodies are sex‐differentiated within a system of genital representation through gender presentation—a system that helps constitute the very boundaries between the public and private.

After reviewing the use of isolation in US prisons and public restrooms to confine transgender people in solitary cells and single‐occupancy bathrooms, I propose an explanatory theory of eliminative space. I argue that prisons and toilets are eliminative spaces: that is, spaces of waste management that use layers of isolation to sanctify social or individual waste, at the outer and inner limits of society. As such, they function according to an eliminative logic. Eliminative logic, as I develop it, involves three distinct but interrelated mechanisms: 1) purification of the social center, through 2) iterative segregation, presuming and enforcing 3) the reduced relationality of marginal persons. By evaluating the historical development and contemporary function of prisons and restrooms, I demonstrate that both seek to protect the gender binary through waves of segregation by sex, race, disability, and gender identity. I further argue that both assume the thin relationality of, in this case, transgender people, who are conceived of as impervious to the effects of isolation and thus always already isolable. I conclude that, if we are to counter the violence of these isolation practices, we not only need to think holistically about eliminative spaces and logic, but also to richly reconceptualize relationality.

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau‐Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau‐Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of “grip” is a signal of impending loss, and is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure‐footed mastery. I read Merleau‐Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise.

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the “mainstreaming” of intersectionality in (white‐dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now‐famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how—by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of “race” and “sex” tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness—antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of “intersectionality” that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio‐legal reproduction of hierarchical power.

We criticize the following views: only the rapist is responsible since only he committed the act; no one is responsible since rape is a biological response to stimuli; everyone is responsible since men and women contribute to the rape culture; and patriarchy is responsible but no person or group. We then argue that, in some societies, men are collectively responsible for rape since most benefit from rape and most are similar to the rapist.

Drawing from our interdisciplinary qualitative study of LGBTI conservative Christians and their allies, we name an especially toxic form of shame—what we call sacramental shame—that affects the lives of LGBTI and other conservative Christians. Sacramental shame results from conservative Christianity's allegiance to the doctrine of gender complementarity, which elevates heteronormativity to the level of the sacred and renders those who violate it as not persons, but monsters. In dispensing shame as a sacrament, nonaffirming Christians require constant displays of shame as proof that LGBTI church members love God and belong in the community. Part of what makes this shame so harmful is that parents and pastors often dispense it with sincere expressions of care and affection, compounding the sense that one's capacity to give and receive love is damaged. We foreground LGBTI Christian movements to overcome sacramental shame by cultivating nonhubristic pride, and conclude by discussing briefly their new understandings of love and justice that could have far‐reaching benefits.

This article theorizes the politics of witnessing and grief in the context of the embodied experience of cows raised for dairy in the Pacific Northwestern United States. Bearing witness to the mundane features of dairy production and their impact on cows' physical and emotional worlds enables us to understand the violence of commodification and the political dimensions of witnessing the suffering of an Other. I argue that greater attention should be paid to the uneven hierarchies of power in the act of bearing witness. Centering the animal as a subject of witnessing allows us to see with particular clarity the ethical ambiguities at work in witnessing while at the same time attending to the importance of witnessing‐as‐politics. My project here is to lay bare moments of emotional and physical turmoil not seen as such—the lives that are rendered ungrievable—and examine how we can and should respond to them. Thus, this article contributes to feminist conversations about witnessing, grief, and the political function of emotion.

Feminist peace theories that find hope for peace in the ideal of the caretaking woman are grounded in patriarchal gender distinctions, fail to challenge adequately the patriarchal dualism that constitutes the self by devaluing the other, and the practice of caretaking about which they speak may be easily co-opted into the service of war. Feminist peace theory should address the devaluation of “others,” in order to undermine this justification and motivation for war.

This paper argues that trans and genderqueer people affect the gender formation and identity of non-trans people. We explore three instances of this relationship between trans and non-trans genders: an allegiance to inadequate liberal-individualist models of selfhood; tropes through which trans people are made to stand as theoretical objects with which to think about gender broadly; and a narrow focus on gender and evasion of an intersectional understanding of gender formation.

This essay discusses a cluster of problems for feminist theory and practice which concern responsibility and choice under conditions of oppression. I characterize four major perspectives from which situations of oppression or victimization can be seen and questions about choice and responsibility answered: The Perspective of the Oppressor; The Perspective of the Victim; The Perspective of the Responsible Actor; and The Perspective of the Observer/Philosopher. 1 compare their strengths and weaknesses and discuss their compatibility.

Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine chims that Carol Gilligan's work is “essentialist,” and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any general claim about women or girls.

Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between “sex” and “gender” and “impairment” and “disability” as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives.

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation.