Alarmed by the domination inherent in the patriarchal idea of truth, the author sketches principles that allow her to develop accounts of reality—to “do theory”—without implying that others should agree. This epistemological setting supports differences among wimmin that are expressed in different understandings of the world; it also supports agreement.

This is a paper about philosophical inquiry and cooking. In it, I suggest that thinking about cooking can illuminate our understanding of other forms of inquiry. Specifically, I think it provides us with one way to circumvent the dilemma of absolutism and relativism.

The paper is divided into two sections. In the first, I sketch the background against which my project is situated. In the second, I develop an account of cooking as inquiry, by exploring five aspects of recipe creation and use.

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the ‘epistemic privilege of the oppressed’ does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed ‘insiders’ have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving ‘outsiders’ who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly hurt by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized.

Shulamith Firestone argues that for women to embrace equal rights without recognizing them for children is unjust. Protection of children is merely repressive control: they are infantilized by our treatment of them. I maintain that many children no longer get much protection, but neither are they being provided with an environment conducive to learning prudence or morality. Recognizing equal rights for children is likely to worsen this situation, not make it better.

Women's activities and relations to men are persistent metaphors for man's projects. I query the prominence of these and the lack of equivalent metaphors where men are the metaphoric vehicle for women and women's activities. Women's role as metaphor results from her otherness and her relational and mediational importance in men's lives. Otherness, mediation, and relation characterize the role of metaphor in language and thought. This congruence between metaphor and women makes the metaphor of woman especially potent in man's conceptual economy.

This paper explores a possibility of atheoretical feminist thinking. Anarchic thinking is a way of thinking which is neither based on nor yields one account of truth or reality. Its particular value to feminists is its affirmation of multiple voices, ways of being and possibilities for action.

This paper explores the poetic politics of lesbian and feminist writing, the textual violence that writing exercises and the amazon intertext it creates. In this particular essay, Jeffner Alien takes as her point of departure the writing of Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig.

This review essay on Janice Raymond's A Passion for Friends, sympathetic to the author's inquiry into the institutional contexts of female friendship, criticizes as unnecessary its rejection of feminist separatism and of the “lesbian continuum” and formulates a possible connection of its account of sources of passionate friendship among women to the new research on women and violence.

This review of Janice Raymond's A Passion for Friends focuses on her strong sense of the individual and of individuality. However, and this is the central contention of my paper, her perspective is quite distinct from liberal individualism. It is also a complex variation on the feminist concern with selves in relationships.

This essay is a response to the comments and critique, included in this issue, of Claudia Card and Marilyn Friedman to my book, A Passion for Friends. In this response, I emphasize the crucial distinction between female separation and dissociation from the world, so as to register the difference between the positive and negative separations in which women are engaged. I also expand the discussion of individuality and individualism. The latter has arisen within the context of a feminist liberal campaign for sexual liberation which defends, among other things, sadomasochism, prostitution, pornography, and surrogacy.

Recent welfare cuts have revealed that the patriarchal control of women's domestic labor has been significantly relocated from the home and the governmental bureaucracy to the marketplace. Through the sale of domestic and reproductive labor, many low income women have come to occupy a class position in relation to middle and upper income families which parallels the position occupied by the traditional wife in relation to her husband.

In “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” Nancy Fraser pursues a “meaning-oriented” inquiry intended to illuminate the gender bias of the American welfare system in order to aid feminists and their allies in the continuing political struggles over the welfare system. For Fraser the fundamental issues are over judgments about what women need—“need interpretation.” I argue that although her analysis of the system is vivid and provocative, it is inadequate as a contribution either to political theory or practical strategy. Fraser substitutes a search for patterns and meanings for careful clarification and defense of political values. She leaves needs without foundation and does not explore the capacities for change in modem liberal states. The meanings she reveals provide us neither with a sound basis for judgments on political values nor with a strategy for improvement.

Victoria Davion confuses seeking approval with the desire for recognition of and respect for one's difference. Ironically, when she asserts that the desire to please others provides an incentive to do well (and thus constitutes a positive aspect of competition) Davion undermines her argument that competition enhances one's sense of self. Rather than enhancing one's sense of self, striving to win approval from others sabotages one's ability to rely on her own judgment and take moral responsibility for herself.

Here I support my position in “Do Good Feminists Compete?” against the suggestion that competing with others weakens rather than strengthens one's sense of self.