Meynell's contention is that feminists should attend to pictures in science as distinctive bearers of epistemic content that cannot be reduced to propositions. Remarks on the practice and function of medical illustration—specifically, images Nancy Tuana used in her discussion of the construction of ignorance of women's sexual function (2004)—show pictures to be complex and powerful epistemic devices. Their affinity with perennial feminist concerns, the relation between epistemic subject and object, and the nature of social knowledge, are of particular interest.

Currently, the preferred accommodation for conscientious objection to abortion in medicine is to allow the objector to refuse to accede to the patient's request so long as the objector refers the patient to a physician who performs abortions. The referral part of this arrangement is controversial, however. Pro-life advocates claim that referrals make objectors complicit in the performance of acts that they, the objectors, find morally offensive. McLeod argues that the referral requirement is justifiable, although not in the way that people usually assume.

The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women's reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.

Simone de Beauvoir held that human experience is intrinsically ambiguous and that there are no values extrinsic to experience, but she also designated some actions as absolute evil. This essay explains how Beauvoir utilized an intrinsic absolute value to ground an action-guiding principle of freedom that justifies her notion of evil. Morgan's analysis counters Robin May Schott's objections that Beauvoir failed to systematically justify her notion of absolute evil and that Beauvoir shifted from a “logic of action” to a “logic of history” when she utilized the concept.

Marya Schechtman's narrative self-constitution view relies on an account of reality as self-evident that eclipses the interpretive labor required to fix the content of intelligibility. As a result, her view illegitimately limits what counts as identity-conferring narrative and problematically excludes many with psychiatric disabilities from the category of full personhood. Plantikow cautions personal identity theorists against this move and offers an alternative approach to engaging in and conceptualizing narrative construction.

In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.

In this paper, Roy attempts to develop a semiprescriptive analysis for the natural sciences by examining more closely a skill that many feminist scientists have been reported to possess. Feminist scientists have often been lauded for their ability to “ask different questions.” Drawing from standpoint theory, strong objectivity, situated knowledges, agential realism, and the methodology of the oppressed, the author suggests that this skill can be articulated further into the feminist practice of research agenda choice. Roy illustrates the usefulness of developing such a practice by addressing her own dilemma of conducting in vitro research in a reproductive biology lab.

Despite clear parallels between Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics and recent scholarship in feminist ethics, feminists are often suspicious of discourse ethics and have kept themselves mostly separate from the field. By developing a sustained application of Habermas's discourse ethics to friendship, Keller demonstrates that feminist misgivings of discourse ethics are largely misplaced and that Habermas's theory can be used to develop a compelling moral phenomenology of interpersonal relations.

Harding's aim in Science and Social Inequality is to integrate the insights generated by diverse critiques of conventional ideals of truth, value freedom, and unity in science, and to chart a way forward for the sciences and for science studies. Wylie assesses this synthesis as a genre of social constructionist argument and illustrates its implications for questions of epistemic warrant with reference to transformative research on gender-based discrimination in the workplace environment.