This paper identifies the founding project of traditional philosophy of language as an attempt to unify the diversity and individuality of spoken language in order to produce a transpersonal intelligibility. The supposed necessary truth that we cannot directly understand what others say which underlies such a project is exposed as a willful avoidance of the discourse of others typical of masculine styles of communication.

The philosopher Enrique Dussel offers a critical analysis of European construction of indigenous peoples which he calls “transmodern.” His theory is especially relevant to feminist and other concerns about the potential disabling effects of postmodern approaches for political action and the development of theory. Dussel divides modernity into two concurrent paradigms. Reflection on them suggests that modernism and postmodernism should not be too strongly distinguished. In conclusion, his approach is compared with that of Mohanty.

“Neither doth our Sex delight or understand Philosophy.” (Margaret Cavendish, 1664)

The author critiques two widely-used works in Women's Studies for their hetero-relational content and the ways in which they minimize the necessity for affinities between women. Dinnerstein and Chodorow give us in theory what movies such as Kramer vs. Kramer depict in the film. It is not co-parenting and the inclusion of the male in an equal parenting role that will remedy present “sexual arrangements,” without first giving attention to women's relations with each other.

Marya Schechtman's narrative self-constitution view relies on an account of reality as self-evident that eclipses the interpretive labor required to fix the content of intelligibility. As a result, her view illegitimately limits what counts as identity-conferring narrative and problematically excludes many with psychiatric disabilities from the category of full personhood. Plantikow cautions personal identity theorists against this move and offers an alternative approach to engaging in and conceptualizing narrative construction.

This essay offers a philosophical analysis of the misogyny women experience in the alternative right (alt-right) movement. I argue that this misogyny takes on a paradoxical form: the better alt-right women propagandists promote hate, the greater the hostility they experience from their fellow racists and critics; the more submissive women alt-right members become, the harsher the impact of misogyny on them. I develop this argument in four parts. Part I explores the self-conception of racist white women using the concept of social imaginaries. Part II describes three dominant images in racist propaganda—the goddess/victim, wife and mother, and the female activist—which inform the more popular images of the white power Barbie and the tradwife in the alt-right. Part III explores the misogyny paradox and presents how alt-right women could be seen as both misogynists and victims of misogyny. Part IV reflects on the absurdity of the alt-right's dependence on women's economic labor, a feature that could make the movement vulnerable to political intervention.

Although there is growing debate among feminist scholars on how fathers often socialize their male children to aspire to embody specific values and behaviors, there is limited academic research on how fathers themselves construct and represent masculinity in Ghana. This article draws on data from six focus group discussions held with forty men to foreground men's negotiations, expressions, and representations of masculinity among the Dagaaba in northwestern Ghana. Our findings suggest that men in rural northwestern Ghana are likely to embody hybrid masculinities where traditionally hegemonic masculine ideals—such as men being seen as independent breadwinners—and contemporary gender-conscious norms—such as men as supportive partners—interact in complex ways. Yet the hybridization of masculinity both challenges and reinforces patriarchal gender arrangements in subtle ways. By maintaining a keen interest in their heteronormative breadwinning role as a model of masculinity, educated and gainfully employed men are critical of patriarchal norms that may be destructive to feminist discourses, yet their representations of masculinity indirectly embolden male hegemony in marriage relationships. Our findings further reveal considerable ambiguity in how men define themselves as supportive allies of feminist discourses by endorsing gender egalitarianism, yet none of them visibly challenges why women cannot also be breadwinners.

The surgical treatment of breast cancer has changed in recent years. Analysis of the research that led to these changes yields apparently good arguments for all of the following: (1) The research yielded very great benefits for women. (2) There was no other way of obtaining these benefits. (3) This research violated the fundamental rights of the women who were research subjects. This sets a problem for ethics at many levels.

This essay discusses the implications of Irigaray's readings of the Antigone in the construction of a feminist ethics. By focusing on the gaps and intersections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian phenomenology as formulative of Irigaray's eventual call for an ethics of sexual difference, 1 emphasize the inevitability of rethinking the functions of historicity, femininity, and maternity in the formation of new models of intersubjectivity.

One of the most influential branches of nineteenth-century American feminism was a resistance movement committed to the idea that the key to social reform was the recognition and maintenance of human differences. This approach, which became central to American pragmatism, had its roots in a tradition of American women writers including Lydia Maria Child. This paper examines Child's work and focuses on her conception of pluralism and its role in sustaining diverse communities.

Because Levinas understands ethical response as a response to the radical alterity of the other, he contrasts it with justice, for which alterity becomes a question of equality. Drawing upon the practice of dependency work and the insights of feminist care ethics, I argue that the opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity‐based principles is belied in the experience of care. Through a hermeneutic phenomenology of caring for my post‐stroke grandfather, I develop an account of dependency work as a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, this dialectic suggests that they complement each other in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of dependency work, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope.

This essay proposes a possible direction for feminist epistemology—an embodied rationality that defines the process of knowing as a dialogue with particulars or the “things themselves.” On the grounds that modem reality is marked by abstract projects of homo mensura, I argue that the task of postmodernism is to ground cognition in the world by breaking the habit of looking at the world, as if from a distance, and by ceasing to think about the world as if it were composed of a collection of objects-in-general.

Nancy Tuana holds that the nature/nurture dichotomy does not accurately represent the world and hence that a whole series of assumptions about human nature is mistaken. She rejects both biological determinism and alternative interactionist views. I argue that although her arguments and political concerns do rule out any kind of simple biological determinism, they do not show that the alternative interactionist view is untenable: in fact, she uses the distinction in her attempt to demolish it. I argue that the assumption that “nature” implies fixity is the source of difficulties here, not the dichotomy itself.

Sara T. Fry maintains that care is a central concept for nursing ethics. This requires, among other things, that care is a virtue rather than a mode of being. But if care is a central virtue of ethics and medical ethics then the claim that care is a central concept for nursing ethics is trivial. Otherwise, it is implausible.

This paper formulates Luce Irigaray's notion of agency as a political way of life. I argue that agency, within an Irigarayan framework, is both the outcome and the condition of a political life, aimed at creating political transformations. As Irigaray hardly addresses the topic of agency per se, I suggest understanding Irigaray's textual style as implying specific “technologies of self” in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as self‐applied social practices that reshape social reality, one's relations to oneself, and enhance one's freedom and pleasures in these relations. This interpretation aims to extract concrete transformative practices, which, by shaping one's sense of self in relation to others, create oneself as a free and active subject.

Dominant Western discourses of motherhood have depicted disabled women as incapable of being mothers. In contrast to these representations, recent literature in disability studies has argued that disabled women can provide maternal care and should therefore retain custody over their children. This literature is commendable, but its emphasis on custodial rights excludes from the category of “mother” those disabled women who cannot maintain child custody. In this article, I challenge this exclusion via an account of my experience with my two mothers: my biological mother, who relinquished custody over me because of her inability to provide care, and my maternal grandmother, who raised me as her child. Theorizing this account, I argue that disability studies must adopt a conception of motherhood that recognizes both alternative kinship structures and mothers whose disabilities preclude them from fulfilling normative conceptions of maternal care. I develop such a conception by synthesizing Judith Butler's theorization of queer kinship with Donald Winnicott's rethinking of the maternal subject. I conclude by drawing on this flexible conception of motherhood to argue that my disabled mother's relinquishing of custody over me to her own mother was the very gesture in which she accepted and adopted a maternal role.

This article examines the treatment of gender and the woman question in the ongoing Latin American decolonial debate. More specifically, it traces how the Zapatistas and other indigenous movements as well as some of the main mestizo male voices in this debate have endeavored to frame these issues and the criticism they have received from María Lugones and other decolonial feminists. It then points to some of the limitations in Lugones's own approach, and in a final stream of discussion, it explores some of the ways in which these limitations might be surpassed within a decolonial framework that follows closely indigenous ontological thought.

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual difference. This article examines the uses of transsexuality throughout Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimorphic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender.