This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Transracialism.” It does not take up the question of “transracialism” itself, but rather attempts to shed light both on what some black women may have experienced following from the publication of the article and on how we might understand this experience as harm. It also suggests one way for feminist journals to reduce the likelihood of similar harms occurring in the future. I begin by describing a discussion that occurred in my classroom that bears some resemblance to the much larger debate that emerged around Hypatia. Next, I elaborate a concept of imperial harm. I then address how this concept comes to be relevant to the experience of black women within the discipline of philosophy in general, before briefly describing how academic feminism (including feminist philosophy) has served as a particular site of imperial harm for black women. Finally, touching on the idea of expressive harm, I conclude with an appeal for the adoption of more feminist publication ethics.

This article argues that gaushalas, or cow shelters, in India are mobilized as sites of Hindutva or Hindu ultranationalism, where it is a “vulnerable” Hindu Indian nation—or the “Hindu mother cow” as Mother India—who needs “sanctuary” from predatory Muslim males. Gaushalas are rendered spaces of (re)production of cows as political, religious, and economic capital, and sustained by the combined and compatible narratives of “anthropatriarchy” and Hindu patriarchy. Anthropatriarchy is framed as the human enactment of gendered oppressions upon animal bodies, and is crucial to sustaining all animal agriculture. Hindu patriarchy refers to the instrumentalization of female and feminized bodies (women, cows, “Mother India”) as “mothers” and cultural guardians of a “pure” Hindu civilization. Both patriarchies commodify bovine motherhood and breastmilk. which this article frames as a feminist issue. Through empirical research, this article demonstrates that gaushalas generally function as spaces of exploitation, incarceration, and gendered violence for the animals. The article broadens posthumanist feminist theory to illustrate how bovine bodies, akin to women's bodies, are mobilized as productive, reproductive, and symbolic capital to advance Hindu extremism and ultranationalism. It subjectifies animal bodies as landscapes of nation‐making using ecofeminism and its subfield of vegan feminism.

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer” (Volcano 2013). For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are often complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. But why women become complicit remains an open question. The aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of complicity by focusing on the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's account. I begin by evaluating Susan James's interpretation of complicity qua republican freedom, which emphasizes the dependent situation of women as the primary cause of their complicity. I argue that James's analysis is compelling as far as it goes, but that it implies complicity is the inevitable outcome of women's current existence and fails to adequately account for Beauvoir's claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. I then draw out the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's analysis, demonstrating how this enables us to systematize Beauvoir's account of women's oppressive situation with her claims regarding the active role women can play in reinforcing their own unfreedom. I argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but provides a better account of cases where complicity may not be inevitable and yet some women still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom.

In the context of abortion stigma, most abortion stories remain untold. The stories we do tell of abortion are often told to morally recuperate the status of the woman who has an abortion through a recourse to tragedy. Tragedy frames experiences where every choice produces some suffering, so decisions are geared toward maintaining individual integrity rather than adherence to absolute moral truths. This article argues that one dominant tragic abortion narrative, that of the disabled fetus, works to recuperate the moral status of “fit” mothers while actively constructing disabled lives as unlivable and undesirable. The option to stigmatize disability in recuperating the moral status of the woman who has an abortion relies on eugenic logics that also construct a variety of women (racialized, poor, disabled, and young) as illegitimate reproductive subjects. The article analyzes narratives of Sherri Finkbine's 1962 abortion in relation to contemporary narratives of late‐term abortions involving nonviable fetuses to expose how investment in medical judgments of good births enables particular women to make use of tragic narratives to maintain their status as moral mothers without disturbing broader abortion stigma or eugenic logics.

Standard accounts of shame characterize it as an emotion of global negative self‐assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self‐evaluation. According to nonstandard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self‐assessment. I argue here in favor of nonstandard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor's standard account (Taylor 1985). Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper's experience of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor's account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame (Piper 1992/1996). Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences (that is, by recasting them as experiences of the righteous shame of the marginalized).

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.

Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists.

Feminist philosophy has offered mixed opinions on the collaborative projects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But although there has been much discussion of the political expediency of what Deleuze and Guattari do say about sexual difference, this article will outline what is absent from Anti‐Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (the two volumes comprising Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Specifically, I will argue that though Deleuze and Guattari offer a historical account of a range of power structures—most notably capitalism, but also despotism, fascism, and authoritarianism—they give no such account of the development of patriarchy. Secondarily, this article will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of contemporary power relations could be improved by adding an accompanying analysis of the institution of patriarchy. After offering a detailed account of the technical vocabulary used by Deleuze and Guattari for the analysis of political institutions, I will argue that what their work requires is an account of how patriarchy is historically produced by an “abstract machine” of masculinity. This article will finish with some suggestions for the way that such an account could be given via an analysis of the abstract machine of phallusization.