This essay shows that Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis-integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a “being-exscribed” begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity.

Quel étrange moi!

—Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus

In 2002, Evolution and Human Behavior published a study purporting to show that the differences in toy preferences commonly attributed to girls and boys can also be found in male and female vervet monkeys, tracing the origin of these differing preferences back to a common ancestor. Despite some flaws in its design and the prima facie implausibility of some of its central claims, this research received considerable attention in both scientific circles and the popular media. In what follows, I survey some of the problems with this study that seem to be characteristic of research into sex differences in a particular research program in evolutionary psychology. I suggest that an epistemology of ignorance is at work that suppresses the methods and insights of an earlier research program, which emphasized the complexity and contingency that ultimately grounds the variety of human behaviors, in favor of one that has been widely criticized as empirically flawed and politically pernicious. I conclude with some speculative remarks on the persistence of this problematic research program in evolutionary psychology.

In Setting Limits, Daniel Callahan advances the provocative thesis that age be a limiting factor in decisions to allocate certain kinds of health services to the elderly. However, when one looks at available data, one discovers that there are many more elderly women than there are elderly men, and these older women are poorer, more apt to live alone, and less likely to have informal social and personal supports than their male counterparts. Older women, therefore, will make the heaviest demand on health care resources. If age were to become a limiting factor, as Dr. Callahan sug-gests it should, the limits that will be set are limits that will affect women more dras” tically than they affect men. This review essay examines the implications of Callahan's thesis for elderly women.

Many discussions of love and the family treat issues of justice as something alien. On this view, concerns about whether one's family is internally just are in tension with the modes of interaction that are characteristic of loving families. In this essay, we challenge this widespread view. We argue that once justice becomes a shared family concern, its pursuit is compatible with loving familial relations. We examine four arguments for the thesis that a concern with justice is not at home within a loving family, and we explain why these arguments fail. We develop and defend an alternative conception of the justice‐oriented loving family, arguing that justice can—and, for the sake of justice, should—be seen as a family value.

A critical review of four recent works that reflect current conflicts and tensions among feminists regarding new reproductive technologies: In Search of Parenthood by Judith Lasker and Susan Borg; Ethics and Human Reproduction by Christine Overall; Made to Order, Patricia Spallone and Deborah Steinberg, eds. and Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michelle Stanworth, ed. Their positions are evaluated against the background of growing feminist dialogue about the future of reproduction and the bearing of reproductive innovations on such related issues as racism, sexuality, motherhood and abortion.

In this paper, I examine activist group ACT UP's campaign to change the US Centers for Disease Control surveillance case definition of HIV and AIDS. This campaign's effects included a profound shift in how AIDS is understood, and thus in some real way in what it is. I argue that classification should be understood as a political formation with material effects, attending to the words of activists, most of them women, who contested the way AIDS was defined in a moment when no one else thought that definition needed to be changed. I argue that philosopher Sue Campbell's work on the importance of understanding memory and feeling as relational helps understand the histories of death and loss, resistance and fierce joy, crystallized in activist responses to HIV and AIDS.

This paper explains the discipline of somaesthetics, which emerges from pragmatism's concern with enhancing embodied experience and reconstructing the aesthetic in ways that make it more central to key philosophical concerns of knowledge, ethics, and politics. I then examine Beauvoir's complex treatment of the body in The Second Sex, assessing both her arguments that could support the pragmatic approach of somaes-thetics but also those that challenge its bodily focus as a danger for feminism.

Political philosophy presents a static conception of childhood as a state of lack, a condition where intellectual, physical, and moral capacities are undeveloped. This view, referred to by David Kennedy as the deficit view of childhood, is problematic because it systematically disparages certain universal features of humanity—dependency and growth—and incorrectly characterizes them as features of childhood only. Thus there is a strict separation between childhood and adulthood because adults are characterized as fully autonomous agents who have reached the end of their moral and cognitive development. I argue that this view is mistaken, and limits both the developmental abilities of adults and ongoing moral development within an organized state. I propose that we view dependency as a human condition. By doing so, children and adults form the kind of relationship with one another that encourages the growth and development of our moral sense in both childhood and adulthood.

Though the literature on care ethics has mushroomed in recent years, much remains to be said about several important topics therein. One of these is action. In this article, I draw on Anscombean philosophy of action to develop a kind of meta- or proto-ethical theory of caring actions. I begin by showing how the fragmentary philosophy of action offered by care ethicists meshes with Elizabeth Anscombe's broader philosophy of action, and argue that Anscombe's philosophy of action offers a useful scaffold for a theory of caring actions. Following this, I defend an account of caring actions as those that aim to meet needs. I argue that care aims at satisfying eudaimonistic needs, those things without which one cannot flourish. I then consider the place of caring actions in care ethics. I suggest that if caring actions are to be a starting point for an ethical theory, we ought to reject the notion that a caring action must bring about its intended consequences, and I show how the concept of practice better equips us to evaluate caring actions.

Scant attention given to gender in Latin American prison experiences implies that men and women suffer similarly and react according to their shared beliefs. This essay explores the prison memoirs of four Latin American women. Each account uses a standardized prison narrative adjusted to suit the narrator's own purpose and hints at how sexuality and motherhood, which shape women's experiences in prison, have been removed from sight.

The American folk concept of race assumes the factual existence of races. However, biological science does not furnish empirical support for this assumption. Public policy derived from nineteenth century slave-owning patriarchy is the only foundation of the “one-drop rule” for black and white racial inheritance. In principle, Americans who are both black and white have aright to identify themselves racially. In fact, recent demographic changes and multiracial academic scholarship support this right.

A number of philosophers and feminist authors have recently equated domestic abuse with the ubiquitous and ill‐defined concept of “terrorism.” Claudia Card, for instance, argues that domestic abuse is a frequently ignored form of terrorism that creates and maintains “heterosexual male dominance and female dependence and service” (Card 2003). Alison Jaggar, in a recent article, also concludes that an acceptable definition of terrorism will find rape and domestic violence to be terrorist acts (Jaggar 2005). Yet there seem to be several obstacles to any simple appropriation of the term “terrorism” for cases of domestic abuse. In this paper I will address what I take to be three significant problems that might be raised with regard to any attempt to identify domestic abuse as an act of terrorism. These problems include the fact that a) definitions of terrorism usually require clear political motivations, b) definitions of terrorism normally require that the terrorist intend to create a climate of terror, and c) adopting the term terrorism for cases of domestic abuse might appear simply inappropriate or unhelpful. I will argue, however, that each of these possible objections can be answered effectively and that domestic abuse rightly falls under the rubric of terrorism.

This essay explores the epistemological significance of the kinds of beliefs that grow out of traumatic experiences, such as the rape survivor's belief that she is never safe. On current theories of justification, beliefs like this one are generally dismissed due to either insufficient evidence or insufficient prepositional content. Here, Freedman distinguishes two discrete sides of the aftermath of psychic trauma, the shattered self and the shattered worldview. This move enables us to see these beliefs as beliefs; in other words, as having cognitive content. Freedman argues that what we then need is a theory of justification that allows us to handpick reliable sources of information on sexual violence, and give credibility where deemed appropriate. She advances a mix of reliabilism and coherentism that privileges feminism. On this account, the evidence for the class of beliefs in question will depend on an act of sexual violence (or testimony, or statistics) to the extent that the act is a reliable indication of the prevalence of sexual violence against women.

Female migrant workers are doubly disadvantaged in China's urban labor market because of their doubly marginalized identities as both women and rural residents. This article takes a process‐centered approach to explore how female migrants' two identity categories generate intersectional effects on their job‐search experiences in cities. Data from in‐depth interviews conducted in Xi'an city, China, in 2010 and 2011 reveal that three patterns of relationship explain the processes where the gender–hukou (residence status) intersection affects female migrants. In the first pattern, a splintering relationship, hukou and gender work singly to form employment discrimination against female migrants. The second, a contesting relationship, indicates that hukou and gender alternate as the primary identities that affect their employment opportunities. In the third, a collaborating relationship, hukou and gender work together to either positively or negatively shape female migrants' employment prospects. No matter which of the relationships plays out, female migrants' disadvantages as cheap urban laborers have become deeply entrenched in the urban labor market. This can be explained by two powerful social institutions in contemporary China, the hukou system and patriarchy.

The analysis of difference and identity questions brought Iris Marion Young to develop a metaphor of collective identity, the city, which included the diversity that characterizes all human groups. This article honors Iris Marion Young by challenging the question of identity in contemporary feminism and social sciences. María Martínez González argues that we need new identity and collective identity metaphors in order to understand the complexity of contemporary feminist praxis.

Feminist epistemologies consider ways in which gender (among other social factors) influences knowledge. In this article, I want to consider a particular kind of feminist empiricism that has been called feminist radical empiricism (where the empiricism, not the feminism, is radical). I am particularly interested in this view's treatment of values as empirical, and consequently up for revision on the basis of empirical evidence. Proponents of this view cite the fact that it allows us to talk about certain things such as racial and gender equality as objective facts: not just whether we have achieved said equality in our society, but whether we are, in fact, all equal. I will raise the concern that the way in which they model the role of values in epistemology may be a problematic idealization of the open‐mindedness of human agents. In some cases, resistance to value‐change cannot be diagnosed as a failure to respond adequately to evidence. If so, the strategy of empirically testing our values that some feminist radical empiricists suggest may not be as useful a tool for social change as they think.

Political action requires a concept of humanity grounded in an explicit notion of human nature. Feminists apprehensive about poststructuralism's implications for a feminist politics need methods and discourses that allow feminist politics to proceed toward a vision of human well-being. Recent work by Chris Weedon and Erica Sherover-Marcuse highlights the need for hypotheses that can guide efforts to dismantle oppressed habits of being and help women evaluate and develop political strategies for universal solidarity.

This essay argues that the ambiguities of the just war tradition, sifted through a feminist critique, provides the best framework currently available for translating the ethical entitlement to human dignity into concrete feminist political practices. It offers a gendered critique of war that pursues the just war distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets of wartime violence and provides a gendered analysis of the peace which the just war tradition obliges us to preserve and pursue.