This article delves into the historical trajectory of Lotta Femminista, a pioneering separatist feminist network in Italy during the early 1970s, and its significant influence on feminist discourse, particularly concerning the advocacy for wages for housework. Through an examination of the group's development within the broader context of the Italian women's movement, this study illuminates the theoretical foundations and practical activism associated with the perspective on wages for housework. Drawing on archival documents and personal accounts, the essay investigates how Lotta Femminista depicted domestic labour as a form of women's exploitation within a Marxist framework. Despite facing criticism and opposition, Lotta Femminista's ideas resonated globally, leaving a legacy in feminist theory and activism. Through its engagement with issues such as the refusal to work and the recognition of unpaid care as a site of capitalist exploitation, Lotta Femminista contributed to the broader history of feminism in Italy and beyond.

The neologism “mansplaining” captures an insidious dynamic in which men explain things to women that women already understand, assuming that, by virtue of being a woman, she lacks the man’s knowledge. Mansplaining has started to receive some attention in contemporary scholarship, conceptualizing the phenomenon and identifying its epistemic harm. My purpose is to consider mansplaining and its harms from the perspective of democratic theory. Setting the problem of mansplaining against the norms we expect of democracy—equality, inclusion, and recognition—I argue that mansplaining poses harms that are not only individual and epistemic but also collective and relational. I distinguish two types of mansplaining based on women’s expertise and experience to elaborate on its collective epistemic harms to decision making and its relational harm of political exclusion. Mansplaining poses further relational harms of inequality and misrecognition, undermining the equal social relations and social trust required for deliberation.

This paper explains why and how we should introduce birth into the canon of subjects explored by philosophy. It focuses on the epistemology of birth, namely, on the nature, origin, and limits of the knowledge produced by and/or related to giving birth. The paper provides a view on the philosophy of birth, i.e., an approach to construct a new logos for genos.

In this essay, a response to an article by Patrick Parkinson, Shannon Gilreath disputes Parkinson’s claim that religiously motivated discrimination against transgender people should be the subject of special exceptions to prevailing antidiscrimination law, especially where the transgender person does not seek to conform to the traditional male/female gender binary. Gilreath maps the ways in which Parkinson’s proposal is an argument for biological superiority, which has been the rationalization for systematic and systemic social inferiority throughout history, including most notably in the contexts of race, gender, and sexuality oppression. In concluding that Parkinson’s proposal is little more than a restatement of the faulty differences-based approach to equality through law, Gilreath ultimately concludes that its principles are wholly inconsistent with the legitimate purposes of antidiscrimination law.

This article argues that the tokenistic appropriation of categories such as gender and race have deprived them of their radical and transformative political and practical roots while facilitating their commodification as a luxury product that is consumed by the depoliticized and privileged. Such (ab)use of gender, as an analytical tool, similar to race and class, has been on the rise within progressive circles. However, with the rise of alt-right populism claiming to know and fight ‘feminism’, as well as the commodification of feminism by progressives, now more than ever a decolonial social reproductive theory is needed to help understand and delineate how women are oppressed in a plethora of intersectional ways based on race, class and ability among other traits, while engaging the specific material historical-constitutive structures, judicial-political and socio-economic dimensions of the world order, as well as the emergence of right-wing populism as white heteronormative backlash. This article argues for a feminist decolonial social reproductive theory that sees gender and racial hierarchy as part of capital’s dynamism (a product), which transforms the natural, social and material world, restructuring and evolving for the ordered extraction of surplus. Although this process may differ temporally and geographically, it nonetheless results in a constellation of class exploitation, governance and struggle that facilitates right-wing backlash and undermines the left’s response, thus obviating the need for decolonial social reproductive theory.

Hesselink proposes a progressive code of European private law as a radical response to Pistor’s The Code of Capital, which exposes private law’s complicity in staggering wealth inequality and social injustice. In this contribution, I argue that the proposal for a progressive code is insufficiently radical, because it is not fully equipped to address root problems of socially unjust private law. I suggest that a fuller accounting of root problems is necessary as a precondition for a ‘radical’ response: a more fundamental rethinking of private law based in more inclusive theorising of its role in social injustice. I sketch some of the ways in which intersectional approaches can assist in a fuller accounting of root problems by elevating and highlighting how mutually constructing systems of privilege and oppression give rise to social injustices that shape people’s lives. Notably, accounting of private law’s complicity in social injustice should engage private law’s coding of capital as entangled with race and gender. I argue that intersectionality is needed to enable the sort of paradigm shift, progressive visions and radical responses Hesselink aspires.

In this paper I use South Africa as a reference point to discuss the company as a juristic person and its relationship to natural persons through the concepts of subjectivity and personhood. I do this in an attempt to reveal that granting of juristic personality as ‘the company’ is not a neutral, organic or inevitable product of the law and economy but a construct symbiotically bound to the colonial state. Underlying this juristic personhood is colonial ideology which perpetuates racialized and gendered poverty and inequality as systemic oppression, in order to deliberately facilitate and maintain conditions of domination and exploitation. Rather than taking the conventional business and human rights starting point that accepts the corporate structure without critique, it is argued that by reorienting away from juristic personality as purportedly ‘neutral’ and reframing the construct, the powers of the company might be curtailed, thereby interrupting these continuing colonial logics.

This article examines the role of women in Hobbes's economic thought. First, I frame Hobbes's economic thought in relation to his philosophical materialism so as to underscore the extent to which Hobbes's materialism entails the insight that human beings are, by definition, productive, economic creatures. I argue that his description of the economy, even without explicit acknowledgment, necessarily positions women as crucial economic actors. I then consider the implications of this in relation to the feminist possibilities of Hobbes's gender politics. I conclude that when deliberating on this question, we face the same conundrum that is evident in all literature considering Hobbes and gender. His radical comments about women in the state of nature are undermined by his seeming indifference to the state of women in commonwealths once they are founded.

As a woman Palestinian dancer and choreographer in Israel, Sahar Damoni performs within multiple contexts of cultural, gendered, and political oppression, employing her bodily art to challenge these structures, most poignantly through dances that express and evoke pleasure and sensual joy. Offering a detailed ethnography of three of Damoni's performances within one year in Israel/Palestine, I argue that an examination of her artistry provides unique insight into the intricate workings—and transgressions—of gender, ethnic, and national boundaries through the movement of the body in dance.

A key curiosity animating this article concerns how sexual violence is theorised. The work of feminist scholars has been crucial in unearthing ways in which women's traditionally demeaned bodies regularly materialised as ‘easy targets’ for such violence. The gift of the concept of gender has played a significant role in facilitating the production of this corpus of knowledge. Less noticed in the literature, in policy and legislation has been sexual violence against men – an egregious omission. Yet it seems that redeploying the concept of gender to make sense of sexual violence against men and elevate this violence into the realms of theoretical and legislative attention is not straightforward. Identifying feminist work as in part responsible for the rendering of sexual violence against men as too ‘unseen’ in theory provoked my attention, though it's not that I place feminist theory as ‘innocent’ or infallible – far from it. In this article I unpack some of the complexities around theorising sexual politics in Global Politics turning towards the aesthetics of feminist thinking to help reconsider the way connections take shape between gender, sex and violence. Underpinning this discussion are questions about feminist intentions to transform patriarchal and colonial structures and institutions.

Sheldon Wolin identifies a particular tradition within political theory that he calls ‘epic theory’. Epic theory, he explains, is political theory's equivalent of the Kuhnian scientific revolution. This article takes up the analogy between epic theory and scientific revolution to show that feminism is an epic theory in the truest sense of the term, a sense not fully grasped by Wolin. It is so for two reasons. First, it is a theory of the whole. Second, it is less a discovery than an invention of the world. The author seeks to account for the existence of feminism in the face of its impossibility, and to demonstrate the magnitude of the achievement that feminism represents.