Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist—but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic—and a poetics—in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

Introduction to the special cluster of articles by feminists from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Inaugural lecture as Professor of Women's Studies in the Social Science Faculty at the University of Utrecht.

In this essay, I provide evidence that a new generation of prochoice advocates wishes to move away from defending abortion rights via the view that fetal life has little or no value (for example, as Mary Anne Warren does in her “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion”) and toward a more complex view of abortion rights. This newer view simultaneously grants that fetuses are more than simply “clumps of cells,” that they are, to some extent, entities that possess some degree of value, and also that women still have the right to decide whether they wish to continue a pregnancy (for example, as can be found in the writings of Rosalind Hursthouse, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Margaret Olivia Little). Prima facie, this may sound like an impossible task—an instance of “having your cake and eating it too”—but I will show throughout my paper that, and how, such a task can indeed be accomplished.

In this paper I argue that the distinction between epistemic privilege and epistemic authority is an important one for feminist epistemologists who are sympathetic to feminist standpoint theory, I argue that, while the first concept is elusive, the second is really the important one for a successful feminist standpoint project.

This essay examines some stereotypes of bisexuals held by some lesbians. I argue that the decision that a lesbian makes not to become involved with a bisexual woman because she is bisexual can recenter men in lesbian desire, a consequence many lesbians would find deeply problematic. The acceptance of these stereotypes also results in sex becoming the defining characteristic of one's sexual orientation, thus privileging sex over any emotional, affectional, and political commitments to women.

This paper is part of a larger project of recovering the work of women thinkers. Heloise has traditionally been read as either a foil of Abelard or his intellectual appendage. In this paper, I present her views on love, religious devotion, and language as an alternative to philosophic method as it is conceived by Abelard.

In the proposed gynecentric aesthetic, which follows the work of Heide Göttner-Abendroth and Alan Lomax, aesthetic activity would function to integrate the individual and society. Intellect, emotion and action would combine to achieve a synthesis of body and spirit. Song and dance would involve the equal expressions of all participants, and aesthetic structures would reflect this egalitarianism. The erotic would be expressed as a vital, positive force, divorced from repression and pornography. The emphasis would be off aesthetic objects to be coveted, hoarded and contemplated, and on dynamic process, fully engaging and socially significant.

In this article, Brison extends the analysis of freedom developed in Nancy J Hirschmann's book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, to an area of controversy among feminist theorists: that of sex work, including prostitution and participation in the production of pornography. This topic raises some of the same issues concerning choice and consent as the three topics Hirschmann discusses in her book—domestic violence, the current welfare system in the United States, and Islamic veiling—but it also raises some distinct ones concerning the social construction of sexuality and possible conflicts between the freedom of some women (who may choose to engage in sex work) and the freedom of others (who may be harmed by the contribution of such work to the social construction of categories such as “women” and “sex”).

Feminist critics have charged that Aristotle's mistaken and harmful remarks about women and slaves show inconsistency or bias-driven arbitrariness. However, this analysis shows that these remarks function within a consistent and coherent theoretical corpus. Thus, both Aristotle's hierarchical and dualistic first principles and the methodology on which his entire corpus is based must be unreliable. Moreover, consistency and coherence must be insufficient warrants of theoretical insightfulness. Aristotle's mistakes suggest caveats for feminist philosophical reconstruction.

In this essay, I argue that Richard Rorty's version of pragmatism focuses too much on community, and gives insufficient attention to the workings of power and the necessary relation between theory and practice. I then turn briefly to the work of Michel Foucault for a better understanding of power relations. Finally, I argue for the value of learning from a group of writers who connect theory and practice in a way that attends to both community and power relations.

The relationship between individuals and communities in knowing is a central topic of discussion in current feminist epistemology. Lynn Hankinson Nelson's work is unusual in grounding knowledge primarily in the community rather than the individual. In this essay I argue that responses to Nelson's work are based on a misinterpretation of her holistic approach. However, Nelson's holism is incomplete and hence inconsistent. I defend a more radically holistic feminist empiricism with a multiaspect view of the knower, which is more consistent with a feminist empiricist approach to evidence.

This essay argues that Hegel's discussion of the family in “The Ethical Order” section of Phenomenology of Spirit undermines the entire project of that text. Hegel's project demands that every element of consciousness be conceptualizable, and yet, woman, an essential unconscious element of consciousness, is in principle unconceptualizable. The end of the essay attempts to relate Hegel's discussion of the family to contemporary discussions of family values.

This article presents Irigaray as a philosopher committed to sociopolitical change by discussing her political thought and her engagement with the European Parliament. It traces her recent work with the ex-Communist Party in Italy back to her early critique of Marx and her subsequent attraction to Hegel's civil definition of the person. The failure of her European Parliament initiative suggests that her thinking is in advance of its possible realization.

In “Post‐Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly emancipated blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life‐giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance.

This article takes the rupturing of normative, linear, reproductive time that occurs in the event of miscarriage as a potentially generative philosophical moment—a catalyst to rethink pregnancy aside from the expectation of child-production. Pregnant time is usually imagined as a linear passage toward birth. Accordingly, the one who “miscarries” appears as suspended within an arrested journey that never arrived at its destination, or indeed, as ejected from pregnant time altogether. But here I propose to rethink both pregnancy and miscarriage through the lens of “suspended time”—a theoretical move that shifts the accent from the future as the dominating frame of reference to the lived present. Drawing on work by Kathryn Bond Stockton, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Baraitser, and others, the article explores overlooked temporalities of pregnancy and miscarriage that operate not in the mode of futural projection or futural loss, but rather through present-oriented forms of adjustment and sensing, attachment and intimacy, maintenance and care. By “suspending the future,” then, we can resist the oppositional framing of pregnancy and miscarriage, because if pregnant time is not represented in exclusively future-oriented terms as being-toward-birth, then miscarriage need not be understood as pregnancy's undoing.

In recent years, feminist scholarship on emotional labor has proliferated. I identify a related but distinct form of care labor, hermeneutic labor. Hermeneutic labor is the burdensome activity of: understanding and coherently expressing one's own feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations; discerning those of others; and inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions. I argue that hermeneutic labor disproportionately falls on women's shoulders in heteropatriarchal societies, especially in intimate relationships between women and men. I also suggest that some of the gendered burdens of emotional labor that feminist scholars point out would better be described as hermeneutic labor. Drawing on feminist philosophy as well as findings from social psychology and sociology, I argue that the exploitation of women's hermeneutic labor is a pervasive element of what Sandra Bartky calls the “micropolitics” of intimate relationships. The widespread expectation that women are relationship-maintenance experts, as well as the prevalence of a gendered demand-withdraw pattern of communication, leads an exploitative situation to appear natural or even desirable, even as it leads to women's dissatisfaction. This situation may be considered misogynistic in Kate Manne's sense, where misogyny is a property of social environments rather than a worldview.

This article examines the use of silent protests to resist state denial and appropriation of activist narratives. Drawing from feminist literary studies, I conceptualize silence as a pluralistic, multifaceted, and multi‐sited force. Through an analysis of several modalities of silence employed during Iran's 2009 election protests, I explore tensions between acts of silencing and silence as an act of dissent. I argue that silent protest is both an effect of—and resistance against—geopolitical conditions that subject Iranian citizens to state silencing. In this article, I examine: (i) the geopolitical conditions that enabled the silencing of Iranian citizens; (ii) meanings and interpretations of silent protests within Iran and internationally; (iii) the relationship among embodiment, scale, and visibility of Iranian protesters. I conclude with thoughts on reading silences across borders, while questioning the efficacy of silent protests in places considered geostrategically insignificant to the international community.

Recent research on women philosophers has led to more discussion of the merits of many previously forgotten women in the past several years. Yet due to the fact that a thinker's significance and influence are historical phenomena, women remain relatively absent in “mainstream” discussions of philosophy. This paper focuses on several successful academic women in American philosophy and takes notice of how they succeeded in their own era. Special attention is given to three important academic women philosophers: Mary Whiton Calkins, Ellen Bliss Talbot, and Marietta Kies.