In feminist linguistic analysis, women's speech has often been characterized as “powerless” or as “over-polite”; this paper aims to challenge this notion and to question the eliding of a feminine speech style with femaleness. In order to move beyond a position which judges speech as masculine or feminine, which are stereotypes of behavior, I propose the term “discourse competence” to describe speech where cooperative and competitive strategies are used appropriately.

For many, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has only historic significance. The aim of this article is to show on the contrary that Beauvoir's philosophy already contains all the elements of contemporary feminism—so much so that it can be taken as its paradigm. Beauvoir's ideas about the self are extremely relevant today. Feminist themes such as the logic of “equality and difference” and identity are interwoven in her thinking in ways that can offer solutions to what seem to be insurmountable dilemmas in modern feminism. The attack on all kinds of essentialism can be reconciled with feminist identity-politics when the latter presents itself as “arts of living.”

This review considers the process of expansion of subjectivity that María Pía Lara introduces in Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. As the complexity of Lara's understanding of multiculturalism is exhibited, the process of achievement of self-realization and autonomy is critiqued as inconsistent with the hidden transcript/public transcript distinction. The “we” to be fashioned intersubjectively in the dialogical process of subjective expansion cannot countenance that crucial distinction to the understanding of those narratives.

Alliance politics is not always an easy proposition. In public discourses about sexualities, unexpected alliances and splits occur even as accomplished alliances fail to achieve their political goals. By considering the models of agency enacted in a series of these alliances, I question how lesbian and feminist and queer actors can more effectively pursue alliance politics in relation to VS. public policy.

Defends “The New Men's Studies: From Feminist Theory to Gender Scholarship” (Hypatia 2:1, Winter 1987) against what is argued are Mary Libertin's misreadings. The argument for men's studies is logically independent of though related to the debate about essentialism in women's studies. Men's studies studies men in and as particular groups. Intellectual should not be equated with institutional autonomy. The feminist study of men should be supported by feminist scholars.

Recent attempts by the neurological and psychological communities to articulate thought differences between women and men continue to mismeasure thought, especially women's thought. To challenge the claims of hemispheric specialization and lateralization studies, I argue three points: 1) given more sophisticated biological models, brain researchers cannot assume that differences, should they exist, between women and men are purely a result of innate structures; 2) the distinction currently being drawn between verbal/spatial thinking abilities is fraught with ideological commitments that undermine the intelligibility of the distinction; 3) the model of thinking as information processing which underlies all this research confuses thinking with internal processing strategies.

As a constructive alternative to the exclusionary binaries of Cartesian philosophy, Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens turn to Spinoza. Spinoza's understanding of the body as “in relation” takes the focus of philosophical thought from the homogeneous subject to the heterogeneity of the social, and the focus of politics from individual rights to collective responsibility. The implications for feminism are radical; Spinoza enables a reconceptualization of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion.

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth‐century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently “just” nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, nonviolent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man.

The history of modern feminist political theories is often framed in terms of the already existing theories of a number of radical nineteenth-century men philosophers such as James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. My argument takes issue with this way of framing feminist political theory by demonstrating that it rests on a derivation that remains squarely within the logic of malestream political theory. Each of these philosophers made use of a particular discursive trope that linked the idea of women's emancipation with the idea of social progress. I argue that this trope reproduced the masculinist signification and symbolism inherent in their particular political philosophies. I argue for a more positive, less masculinist, account of the history of feminist political thought.

Much of Ofelia Schutte's work has been focused on the question of liberation, especially for women and for colonized peoples. In this paper I discuss some of the important contributions she has made toward understanding the difficulty of dialogue across differences of culture and power, and toward thinking through the relationships of culture, identity, and social justice. Although I generally agree with Schutte's positions, I try here to initiate a dialogue about some conflicting tendencies I see in her positions. Specifically, I challenge her reliance on Nietzsche in developing a general approach to the question of liberation.

Though Indigenous women in Mexico have traditionally exhibited some of the highest levels of maternal mortality in the country—a fact that some authors have argued was an important reason to explain the EZLN uprising in 1994—there is some evidence that the rate of maternal mortality has fallen in Zapatista communities in the Chiapas Highlands in the last two decades, and that other health indicators have improved. In this article, we offer an account of the modest success that Zapatista communities have achieved in improving their health levels. In particular, we argue that Zapatista women have implicitly used a form of feminist standpoint theory to diagnose the epistemic (and economic) injustice to which they have been traditionally subjected and to develop an epistemology of resistance that is manifested in actions such as becoming health promoters in their communities. We also argue that this epistemology of resistance is partially responsible for the improvement of health levels in their communities. Finally, on the basis of our discussion of the Zapatista case, we suggest that standpoint theory could play an important role in other healthcare settings involving oppressed minorities.

The main aim of this article is to use the resources of relevant-alternatives contextualism to provide an account of an unrecognized form of epistemic injustice that I call irrelevance-injustice. Irrelevance-injustice occurs either when a speaker raises an alternative that is not taken seriously when it should be, or when a speaker raises an alternative that is taken seriously when it should not be. Irrelevance-injustice influences what alternatives are perceived to be relevant and patterns of knowledge ascriptions in ways that are unfair. Asymmetries in whose alternatives are taken seriously affect how many alternatives members of different groups must rule out prior to being ascribed knowledge. Because knowledge ascriptions have socially valuable functions, asymmetries in whose alternatives are taken seriously mean asymmetries in who gets to do socially valuable things with knowledge ascriptions.

In this article, I explore the relationship between performativity, as it appears in Judith Butler's work, and plasticity, as it appears in the work of Catherine Malabou. I argue that these concepts are isomorphic. Butler and Malabou both hold that resistance to contemporary forms of power, or “insubordination,” is contingent on a subject's ability to become other than what it is; Butler articulates this ability in terms of performativity, and Malabou articulates it in terms of plasticity. I reveal the social-constructivist dimension of Malabou's work while also making apparent the extent to which Butler's work, contrary to her own way of conceptualizing it, and hence surprisingly and uneasily, presupposes a biologically basic capacity for change. Plasticity is this biologically basic capacity. Both thinkers affirm the idea that insubordinate forms of transformation can be impeded by the discourse that conditions what a subject can think. I suggest that this is an insight that must be heeded, even as I seek to affirm a form of plasticity beyond discourse.

A dominant area of inquiry within intergenerational ethics concerns how goods (and bads) ought to be justly distributed between noncontemporaries. Contractualist theories of justice that have broached these discussions have often centered on the concepts of mutual advantage and (indirect) reciprocal cooperation between rational, self‐interested beings. However, another prominent reason that many in the present feel that they have obligations toward future generations is not due to self‐interested reciprocity, but simply because they care about what happens to them. Care ethics promises to be conceptually well‐suited for articulating this latter reason: given that future generations are in a perpetual condition of dependency on present‐day people's actions, this is precisely the kind of relational structure that care theorists should be interested in morally evaluating. Unfortunately, the care literature has been largely silent on intergenerational ethics. This article aims to advance this literature, offering the blueprints of what a care ethic concerning future generations—a “future care ethic”—should look like. The resultant ethic defends a sufficientarian theory of obligation: people in the present ought to ensure the conditions needed to encourage and sustain a world that enables good caring relations to flourish.

In this article, I argue in favor of an intersectional account of religious identity to better make sense of how religious subjects can be treated with epistemic injustice. To do this, I posit two perspectives through which to view religious identity: as a social identity and as a worldview. I argue that these perspectives shed light on the unique ways in which religious subjects can be epistemically harmed. From the first perspective, religious subjects can be harmed when their religion is racialized or when their gender and dress are mistakenly thought to be predictive of their beliefs and practices. As an instance of this, I focus on the epistemic harms facing Muslim women who practice veiling. From the worldview perspective, religious subjects can be harmed when we, by contrast, underestimate the force of the connections between religion, race, and gender. Such connections can give rise to intersectionally rich theologies that can in turn be marginalized and denied credibility. To illuminate the worldview perspective, I focus on Christian abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth.