It is often claimed that gender data gaps (GDGs) are unjust, but the nature of the injustice has not been interrogated. We argue that injustices arising from such data gaps are not merely socio-political but also epistemic: they arbitrarily skew the epistemic landscape in favour of one group over another. GDGs place a greater epistemic burden on women and gender minorities; they have to do more to avoid error and the pay-off is worse: they have a smaller pool of true beliefs on which to act. We suggest that there are both pragmatic and conceptual reasons to differentiate the injustice arising from GDGs from other more familiar varieties (such as testimonial and hermeneutical injustice), and so we introduce the new concept of epistemic deprivation to capture this injustice.

This paper engages with a series of recent literatures that examine how feminist and queer movements have become agents of nationalism, neoliberalism, and global wars. I argue that, while the critique of intersectionality has attempted to curtail the reproductions of such violence within feminism, it too has not been able to resist cooptations into nationalist and capitalist forms of power. Developing an epistemological critique of intersectionality, I arrive at an analysis of identity politics as an elemental identification with phallic power that erases the feminine. Building on the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Wendy Brown, and Luce Irigaray, I suggest that at the core of such feminist alliances with domination lies an unresolved relation to feminine desire as the desire for a non-identitarian politics.

We advance a novel approach to gender inclusive language, showing how it can be used in perinatal and postnatal care. Existing attempts to use language inclusive of trans and non-binary parents have faced objections, prompting calls to use trans-exclusionary “sexed” language as a default (Gribble et al. 2022). We show that these objections attach only to some unsatisfactory attempts at inclusive language. We articulate the moral and communicative goals at stake, and then work through a range of examples to show that no single linguistic strategy can meet these goals in all contexts. A pluralistic approach is needed. Our pluralistic approach draws on gender neutral, gender additive, and second-person locutions, as well as taking advantage of the possibility for multiple targeted communications. Moreover, this pluralistic approach highlights the gaps in research and understanding needed to ensure substantively inclusive care in future.

Luce Irigaray offers a critical account of feminist desire in response to Hegelian, Freudian, and Lacanian models of desire based on lack. However, she reproduces anti-Black and colonial logics within her feminist, supposedly liberatory accounts of desire, thereby creating false utopias and limiting possibilities for liberatory struggle. This article brings Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) into conversation with theorists in critical Black studies. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s articulation of Unpayable Debt (2022) and Joy James’ concept of the captive maternal (James 2015; James 2016; James 2021; James 2022), I offer a radical proposal for the abolition of desire. Following revolutionary abolitionisms’ dual method of destruction and creation, I theorize both the destruction of the death-dealing concepts and practices of desire, as well as a sketch of revolutionary love as the inventive dimension of the abolition of desire. The features of revolutionary love that I engage include a valuing of freedom by any means necessary (including sacrifice) and a commitment to social life that honors and defends unpayable debts. Revolutionary love embodies difference without separability, toward the abolition and decolonization of the (colonial, anti-Black, racial capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal) world as we know it, rather than its reformation.

In this article, I discuss some ways in which my experience, as a sexual assault survivor, has often been disregarded. It was disregarded when it occurred, by a crowd of people who watched. It has also been disregarded, however, in certain sorts of conversations—that occur within feminist communities—about sexual violence. The latter forms of disregard stem from the fact that I am male, and so do not fit many peoples’ preconceptions about survivors of sexual assault. After discussing these different forms of disregard and how they relate, I raise some difficult questions concerning whether, and how, conversations about sexual violence should make room for experiences like mine. In closing, I propose tentative, schematic answers to those questions.

Much of the existing philosophical literature on BDSM focuses on questions about the ethics of BDSM. But there is an underlying question here regarding the nature of BDSM, one which remains largely unaddressed. In this paper, I take that metaphysical question to be prior to the normative one. In other words: it will be important to have a clear view of what BDSM is before we go on to evaluate it. Accordingly, this is a paper about the nature of BDSM and BDSM activities: what they are like, what makes them unique, and the ways in which these activities might be valuable. Here, I work from the philosophical literature on games to analyze structured erotic encounters (or “scenes”) in BDSM. In the first half of the paper, I argue that BDSM scenes are games, and that understanding them in this way yields important insights into the roles of agency, autonomy, and value in BDSM. In the second half of the paper, I map points of connection between this view of scenes-as-games and the existing literature on BDSM in sexual ethics, in order to illuminate the ways in which a moral evaluation of BDSM scenes might proceed from this analysis.

Theories of moral responsibility have often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might. Recent accounts of oppressive praise have challenged this and demonstrated that oppressive praise will track and enforce oppressive norms. Existing solutions to the problem of oppressive praise have sought either to redistribute praise or to reorient praise to serve emancipatory goals. These solutions fail to acknowledge how emancipatory norms evolve over time, and the relationship between developing norms and developing practices of praise. This paper offers a practice-dependent account of progressive praise as a solution to oppressive praise, that (i) respects agent’s socially self-governed agency and (ii) does not reinforce oppressive norms, but (iii) can contribute to improvements to the social moral ecology.

The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender, which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s gender is determined by their gender identity if they have one; otherwise, it is determined by their social position. My structured theory of gender offers a more direct solution to the gender inclusion problem than alternatives recently advocated by Barnes (2020), Jenkins (2023), and others. It also points the way to a simple solution to inclusion problems that arise at the level of gendered language.

During the early 1970s, the Italian feminist movement opened up to foreign militant contexts. The two crucial interplays were with the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. The aim of this article is to analyze from a transnational historical perspective the connection between Milanese activists and the French group Psychanalyse et politique led by Antoinette Fouque, which developed through several encounters during a period of a few days. From the French militants, the Milanese women learnt the political practice of unconscious which differed from the more diffuse consciousness-raising technique. From those meetings I reflect on general issues linked to the Italian and French feminist movements of that time: for instance, viewing the women’s separatist communal life both as a response to the New Left’s refusal to take on the peculiarity of women’s oppression and as the positive exemplification of the deconstructive claim that the personal is political. I also consider the contrast between the use of psychoanalysis and consciousness-raising practices, the significance of orality as a feminist means of communication, and the relationship between orality and the later trend of feminist bookshops. The ultimate goal is to understand the political effectiveness and limitations of the transnational feature of those encounters.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize how the wave narrative maintains and reinforces the hegemony of Western-dominant feminisms while silencing, excluding, appropriating, and/or diluting Othered feminisms and gender-related perspectives. As Western-dominant feminist historicizations travel to the wave narrative, they become the points of reference to all, while Othered historicizations are either erased or Westernized and whitewashed as they travel to the wave narrative. First, to present these problematizations, I will articulate with Edward Said’s travelling theories, Santiago Castro-Gómez’s zero-point hubris, and Linda Alcoff’s speaking for the other. Secondly, I will argue the wave narrative is embedded in Western myths that reinforce its supremacy, including the myths of: (i) true-universal feminisms; (ii) neutral locus of enunciation; (iii) linear-progressive feminist historicization; and (iv) white feminist savior. Finally, I seek to contribute with the theoretical perspectives presented in this paper by focusing on: (1) the importance of understanding from-to/how-by theories and historicizations travel; (2) how Othered epistemologies are located, according to zero-point hubris logics, within hyper-surveilled points of no-observation; and (3) how the dilution and appropriation of Othered stories and epistemologies by Western-dominant feminisms is not simply speaking for Others, but speaking above Others.

This article examines the United Nations Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security (WPS) and argues for an expansion of existing agendas to incorporate security away from the repetition of militarized security, extractive capital, and Western humanism through attention to maritime security. Drawing on posthuman feminisms, critical ocean studies, and decolonial and queer feminist engagements with the ocean, I propose the identification of the ocean as a legal subject to enact an unmooring of the ways in which gendered security is currently thought about, realized, and deployed in legal spaces. The liberal feminist preoccupation with including women and creating gender parity, the radical feminist legal agenda for addressing sexual violence, and the cultural feminist legal reforms that center women’s differences are challenged as reasserting and reifying the status quo of law and legal arrangements. Feminist maritime security, posthuman, with the ocean as subject, contributes ways to think and know law in new registers and addresses the legacy of humanist exclusions of both human and nonhuman subjects. Furthermore, oceanic subjectivity invites reflection on the necessity of terraqueous thinking for planetary survival.

This dialogue between Prof Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University) and Asijit Datta is based on an online discussion, “Ecology, Extinction, and Posthumanism” which took place on the 1st of August, 2020 during the raging days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The transcript echoes Colebrook’s sentiments that the ethical demands of the climate hazard or the imminent extinction cannot be addressed to a particular subject or ‘we’. The predominant tension is concealed in the idea of the human and its values. As humans, we refuse to ask whether there is a future where life continues with endless possibilities for us. For Colebrook, the inability to adopt such a stance emerges from the historical condition that we as language-beings have always been the ones to define life, the ones that are essentially racing towards extinction. Following the extinction experiments of Husserl and Bergson, Colebrook contends that only the death of the ethical and political subject can provide us with alternate modes of survival in this world. This conversation engages with issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, American politics, and post-apocalyptic cinema to arrive at an imagination that requires the annihilation of the human as we know it.

The realities of the Anthropocene, from climate change to pandemics to plastics, necessitate substantially different ways of understanding what it means to act in the world today. In response, feminist scholars within the field of new materialism have attempted to rethink the nature of agency and action. This article focuses on two unresolved challenges with their framework: first, it lacks a way to make distinctions or draw boundaries between different entities and actors and, second, it simplifies the relationship between ontology and ethics, implying that an ontological transformation will lead to more ethical and just relationships with the more-than-human world. I argue that to address these challenges new materialism should look to ecofeminism, particularly the philosophy of Val Plumwood; this pairing is especially pertinent considering the often overlooked or downplayed genealogical connections between them. I also argue, however, that new materialism has something to offer Plumwood: its reconceptualization of agency better responds to contemporary circumstances in ways foreclosed by Plumwood’s more limited account. I conclude that a coalition between new materialism and ecofeminism—a new materialism supplemented and modified by aspects of Plumwood’s account—provides valuable conceptual tools with which to respond to the Anthropocene condition.

Sex work is highly gendered, with 80 percent of sex workers being female, and the vast majority of buyers of sex being male. It is often taken for granted that this is how it is, and implicit in much of the debate around sex work is the assumption that it is inherently gendered. In this paper, I question this assumption, drawing on sociological research to challenge arguments which purport that it is inconceivable that women would ever want to pay for sex, or that sex work would exist under conditions of gender equality. I argue that gendered sexual norms likely are a significant reason for why sex work is so gendered, but sex work would probably continue to exist under conditions of gender equality, due to the diversity in motivations people have for buying and selling sex. Acknowledging that sex work is not inherently gendered is important for (at least) two reasons. First, it is probable that the gendered nature of sex work contributes to the stigma and bad treatment that sex workers, particularly female ones, face. Secondly, if sex work is not inherently gendered, this will have implications for how we should think about it, morally, practically, and legally.

The relation between epistemic relativism and epistemic oppression is contentious but undertheorized. Both positions rest on one or the other version of the situated knowledge thesis, based on the idea that access to and justification of knowledge is dependent on a particular context or, to be precise, an epistemic system. Whether this notion is coextensive in both schools of thought is, however, unclear. In this article, I aim to examine the relation between epistemic relativism and epistemic oppression by analyzing the notion of “epistemic system.” Through this analysis, I shall argue that the epistemic relativism literature has neglected power imbalances within epistemic systems since it rests on idealizing epistemic systems to sets of epistemic principles. Understanding epistemic systems as necessarily social and political, I then confront the idea formulated in the epistemic oppression literature that some forms of oppression are “irreducibly epistemic.” I argue that epistemic principles can never fully determine their applications and thus essentially require the social. Thus, insisting on the “irreducibly epistemic” might not be a favorable option for epistemic oppression or epistemic relativism scholarship.

Caleb Ward interviews Black feminist writer, poet, educator, organizer, and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Audre Lorde’s spirituality, her ecological political praxis, her pedagogy, and the cross-generational scale of social change.

This paper critically addresses the logics of exceptionality inherent to emerging regulations of the gender field, with a focus on Spain’s recent self-determination-based regulation of gender. To achieve this, it offers a biopolitical analysis of the concept of “public order” and its influence on gender governance, drawing parallels to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception and exploring the connections between contemporary regulations and the gendered public order of nineteenth-century France. Finally, it analyzes the exclusions and restrictions that the Spanish trans law reserves for migrants, non-binary people, and minors, contributing to the ongoing discourse on the limitations to gender autonomy in contemporary Western societies.

In this paper I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth-century France. Although forgotten after her death, Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but with very few notable exceptions, her philosophical work is still in the margins. In addressing this gap in the literature, I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of ideas, particularly focusing on her contribution to process epistemologies. I argue that Germain was a truly transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre and that her philosophical work should be mapped in the wider field of process philosophies. In doing so I make connections between Sophie Germain and Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, particularly focusing on their take on feelings, prehensions, happy ideas, and events.

This paper reflects on representations of the convergence of Islam and feminism in light of the recent uprising of Iranian women. Most of the existing literature discussing Muslim women’s rights are locked in a dichotomy of approaches, one being prejudicial and the other apologetic. The prejudicial approach is a (neo-)Orientalist one. It understands Muslim societies as backward and their redemption in abandoning Islam and following the lead of the “West.” The apologetic approach is a multiculturalist one, advocating most prominently by academic feminists based in Europe and United States. In trying to reclaim agency for Muslim women, this approach denies real oppressions happening in Muslim societies, and as a result of Islamic practices. Inspired by Iranian women’s fight for freedom, this paper challenges the aforementioned dichotomy, and instead calls for a third approach that begins with, and responds to, the lived experiences of women living in Muslim societies.