This article introduces a concept that I refer to as racialized forgiveness. Cases that exemplify certain conditions that I take as paradigmatic of the problem of racialized forgiveness include instances in which: (a) who is forgiven or not is determined by the race of the offender; (b) praise and criticisms of forgiveness are determined by the race of the victim; and (c) praise and criticisms of forgiveness are, at least implicitly, racially self-serving. I argue that this practice is morally objectionable because of its psychological origins, moral failures, and negative effects. Accordingly, in order to dodge these pitfalls, we need to practice forgiveness differently.

This essay concerns Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of blame and punishment in “Œil pour œil” and the irreconcilable tensions that haunt it. I study these tensions—between the desire to blame and punish and the inability to provide moral justification for these practices—and locate their source in Beauvoir's conception of ethics in Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté. According to my reading, her ethics implies that violence violates freedom, the grounding principle of ethical life. Retaliatory and retributive judgments and the punishment they uphold, regardless of whether they are exerted by individuals or by official state powers, are forms of violence and are therefore unjustifiable. The aporias of blame and punishment in “Œil pour œil” suggest that Beauvoir's ideal of ethics necessitates an abolitionist position regarding punishment. The essay ends with a reflection on the affinity between the position constructed from Beauvoir's work and feminist abolitionist theories that seek to undermine the legal, social, and political institutions that perpetuate, rather than resolve, economic, racial, gender, sex, and class inequality.

In this article I examine the moral dimensions of gender-affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender-affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender-affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender-affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their marginalization. In the latter part of the article, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak on the use of gender-neutral language (Dembroff and Wodak 2018). They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender-affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender-affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering.

The frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan is justly renowned as a powerful visual advertisement for his political philosophy. Consequently, its rich imagery has been the subject of extensive scholarly commentary. Surprisingly, then, its gendered dimensions have received relatively limited attention. This essay explores this neglected facet of the frontispiece. I argue that the image initially appears to present a hypermasculine sovereign. However, upon closer inspection, and considered alongside Hobbes's economic theory, it yields to a reading of the sovereign as an ambiguously gendered figure. Reading the frontispiece through the prism of gender and the economy reveals not a static image of unwavering male power but rather one of an equivocally-sexed creature teeming with life, contradictions, and complexities worthy of continued examination.

Miranda Fricker distinguishes two senses in which testimonial injustice is epistemic. In the primary sense, it is epistemic because it harms the victim as a giver of knowledge. In the secondary sense, it is epistemic, more narrowly, because it harms the victim as a possessor of knowledge. Her characterization of testimonial injustice has raised the following objection: testimonial injustice is not always an epistemic injustice, in the narrow, secondary sense, as it does not always entail that the victim is harmed as a knowledge-possessor. By adopting a perspective based on Robert Brandom's normative expressivism, we respond to this objection by arguing that there is a close connection, conceptual and constitutive rather than merely causal, between the primary and the secondary epistemic harms of testimonial injustice, such that testimonial injustice always involves both kinds of epistemic harm. We do so by exploring the logic and functioning of belief and knowledge ascriptions in order to highlight three ways in which the secondary epistemic harm caused by testimonial injustice crystallizes: it undermines the epistemic agency of the victim, the epistemic friction necessary for knowledge, and the possibility of occupying particular epistemic nodes.

This essay begins to develop a philosophical interpretation of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale, a work of fiction that is known in English as The Neapolitan Novels. My ultimate aim is to explore the work's ambitious moral psychology, and particularly its subtle conceptualization of women's path to freedom. I begin by reconstructing some of the main ideas of Italian difference feminism as they are expressed in the texts of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective—texts that are controversial milestones of Italian social theory, yet are relatively unknown outside of Italy. I then show how these ideas provide a useful frame of reference for interpreters of Ferrante's novel. This discussion sets up a more extended analysis (in part 2 of this essay) of the special status of Lila Cerullo, her strange condition of smarginatura (“dissolving boundaries”), and the import of her puzzling earthquake speech.

This article concerns itself with the ways that Black women have taken up #BlackGirlMagic as a critical reimagining of their subject positionalities as Black women. I argue that #BlackGirlMagic is a resistant imaginary that has significantly altered the contemporary western social imaginary and suggest that the intersectional ambiguity that Black women animate builds community among Black women toward collective liberation. Bringing together Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity, and María Lugones's concept of oppressed←→resisting subjects, I argue that #BlackGirlMagic's so-called “magic” is both produced by and produces what José Medina has termed a guerrilla epistemology. In outlining the contours of this epistemology, I demonstrate how #BlackGirlMagic resists through the transmission of knowledge, the creation of a critical genealogy, its visionary orientation, and the development of an insurrectionary counterdiscourse. To illustrate, I briefly discuss how #BlackGirlMagic provides white women with an opportunity for a beneficial form of epistemic friction. In the end, I suggest that #BlackGirlMagic's ability to unite Black women transnationally bodes well for its continued effects on the western social imaginary.

This article explores the affective dimension of resilient epistemological systems. Specifically, I argue that responsible epistemic practice requires affective engagement with nondominant experiences. To begin, I outline Kristie Dotson's account of epistemological resilience whereby an epistemological system remains stable despite counterevidence or attempts to alter it. Then, I develop an account of affective numbness. As I argue, affective numbness can promote epistemological resilience in at least two ways. First, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes even after these stereotypes have been rationally demystified. To illustrate, I examine the stereotype of Black criminality as it relates to false confessions (Lackey 2018). Second, it can encourage “epistemic appropriation” (Davis 2018), which I demonstrate by examining the appropriation of “intersectionality” and #MeToo by white culture. Finally, I conclude that resisting harmful resilience requires affective resistance, or efforts that target numbness via different kinds of affective engagement. I consider Kantian “disinterestedness” as a candidate.

Contemplating the techniques of white nationalism used to refuse Black ontology and deny Black belonging to the humanity of Canadian nationhood, this article considers how art imaginatively visualizes rebellion against the racist logics that regulate such denials. Exploring the function of hyperbole, this article examines the ways the willfully heightened strangeness of the extraterrestrial Afro-Astronaut and Black Muslim monster depicted in performance and visual art trouble racial matrixes through the dissonance provoked by the Other's unfamiliar display of excess.

My mother is losing her mother to Alzheimer's disease. Although my mother feels loss, I am connecting through my (maternal) grandmother to our ancestors, including a deceased father and paternal grandmother. I am also connecting to a daughter who has lost her mother, through a (maternal) grandmother who, through her loss of memory, is more open to kin networks than my mother. Through deepening connections to my maternal grandmother and to my daughter, I feel I am losing my mother. I look to revolutionary mothering as a way to reconnect shattered bonds and find lost mothers. This article honors the important work of Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, and countless revolutionary mothers.

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems.

In her highly influential 1984 study Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker speculates that opposition to legal abortion among women was likely to be strongest among those who were full-time homemakers without a college education (Luker 1984, 163). But despite a marked decline in that demographic group and a well-documented rise in public support for gender equality since then, the rate of support for legal abortion has remained stubbornly fixed at between fifty and fifty-five percent (Shields 2012). This tepid support has coincided with a steep decline in abortion services in rural states, and ever more sweeping restrictions on abortion being tested in the courts (Rose 2006, 89). Karissa Haugeberg's Women against Abortion and Katie Watson's Scarlet A both seek to address this state of affairs, albeit in markedly different ways. Haugeberg provides a historical chronicle of the motives and strategies of certain key women activists in the fight against legal abortion, with an eye toward how their concerns “came to serve as blueprints to legislators and judges who continue to craft policies and laws that erode women's right to abortion” (Haugeberg, 8). Katie Watson draws upon her experience as an attorney and bioethicist to write a guide “intended to encourage and equip you to engage in respectful, productive, private conversation about your experience with, and opinion of, abortion” (Watson, 37). Though both authors reveal their support for legal abortion, both are concerned to understand the motives and goals of those who fight against it.