This paper argues that the language of rights cannot express distinctively ecofeminist insights into the treatment of nonhuman animals and the environment. An alternative is proposed in the form of a politicized ecological ethic of care which can express ecofeminist insights. The paper concludes with consideration of an ecofeminist moral issue: how we choose to understand ourselves morally in relation to what we are willing to count as food. “Contextual moral vegetarianism” represents a response to a politicized ecological ethic of care.

In this paper I explore white attempts to move toward a proactive position against racism that will amount to more than self-Criticism in the following three ways: by assessing the debate within feminism over white women's relation to whiteness; by exploring “white awareness training” methods developed by Judith Katz and the “race traitor” politics developed by Ignatiev and Garvey, and; a case study of white revisionism being currently attempted at the University of Mississippi.

This article compares Confucian ethics of Jen and feminist ethics of care. It attempts to show that they share philosophically significant common grounds. Its findings affirm the view that care-orientation in ethics is not a characteristic peculiar to one sex. It also shows that care-orientation is not peculiar to subordinated social groups. Arguing that the oppression of women is not an essential element of Confucian ethics, the author indicates the Confucianism and feminism are compatible.

Posthumanist feminist theory has been instrumental in demonstrating the salience of gender and sexism in structuring human–animal relationships and in revealing the connections between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals. Despite the richness of feminist posthumanist theorizations it has been suggested that their influence in contemporary animal ethics has been muted. This marginalization of feminist work—here, in its posthumanist version—is a systemic issue within theory and needs to be remedied. At the same time, the limits of posthumanist feminist theory must also be addressed. Although posthumanist feminist theory has generated a sophisticated body of work analyzing how gendered and sexist discourses and practices subordinate women and animals alike, its imprint in producing intersectional analyses of animal issues is considerably weaker. This leaves theorists vulnerable to charges of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and elitism despite best intentions to avoid such effects and despite commitments to uproot all forms of oppression. Gender‐focused accounts also preclude understanding of the importance of race and culture in structuring species‐based oppression. To counter these undesirable pragmatic and conceptual developments, posthumanist feminist theory needs to engender feminist accounts that centralize the structural axes of race and culture.

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner* graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.

European political theorists have argued that contemporary imaginaries of climate change are symptomatic of a post‐political condition. My aim in this essay is to consider what this analysis might mean for a feminist green politics and how those who believe in such a project might respond. Whereas much of the gender‐focused scholarship on climate change is concerned with questions of differentiated vulnerabilities and gendered divisions of responsibility and risk, I want to interrogate the strategic, epistemological, and normative implications for ecological feminism of a dominant, neoliberal climate change narrative that arguably has no political subject, casts Nature as a threat to be endured, and that replaces democratic public debate with expert administration and individual behavior change. What hope is there for counter‐hegemonic political theories and social movements in times like these? I suggest that rather than give in and get on the crowded climate change bandwagon, an alternative response is to pursue a project of feminist ecological citizenship that blends resistance to hegemonic neoliberal discourses with a specifically feminist commitment to reclaiming democratic debate about social‐environmental futures.

This essay analyzes why women whose immigration status is dependent on their marriage face higher risks of domestic violence than women who are citizens and explores the factors that collude to prevent acknowledgment of their greater susceptibility to battering. It criticizes elements of current U.S. immigration policy that are detrimental to the welfare of battered immigrant women, and argues for changes that would make immigration policy more sensitive to their plight.

This paper analyzes the connections between sexual violence and colonialism in the lives and histories of Native peoples in the United States. This paper argues that sexual violence does not simply just occur within the process of colonialism, but that colonialism is itself structured by the logic of sexual violence. Furthermore, this logic of sexual violence continues to structure U. S. policies toward Native peoples today. Consequently, anti-sexual violence and anti-colonial struggles cannot be separated.

In this paper, we provide a new framework for understanding infant‐feeding‐related maternal guilt and shame, placing these in the context of feminist theoretical and psychological accounts of the emotions of self‐assessment. Whereas breastfeeding advocacy has been critiqued for its perceived role in inducing maternal guilt, we argue that the emotion women often feel surrounding infant feeding may be better conceptualized as shame in its tendency to involve a negative self‐assessment—a failure to achieve an idealized notion of good motherhood. Further, we suggest, both formula‐feeding and breastfeeding mothers experience shame: the former report feeling that they fail to live up to ideals of womanhood and motherhood, and the latter transgress cultural expectations regarding feminine modesty. The problem, then, is the degree to which mothers are vulnerable to shame generally, regardless of infant feeding practices. As an emotion that is less adaptive and potentially more damaging than guilt, shame ought to be the focus of resistance for both feminists and breastfeeding advocates, who need to work in conjunction with women to oppose this shame by assisting them in constructing their own ideals of good motherhood that incorporate a sense of self‐concern.

This essay uses the phenomenal advent of women's climbing as a paradigm case for integrating feminism and phenomenology, and for analyzing how women experience and evolve free movement and existence. In contrast to the paradigm set by Iris Marion Young's “Throwing like a Girl,” it stresses the category of the lived body over the category of gender, and it reveals how women, by employing and cultivating the body's motility and spatiality, engage and transcend the (gender) limits of crux situations.

This article utilizes the work of Judith Butler in order to chart a queer and feminist animal studies, an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. Butler's commentary on other animals remains dispersed and fragmented throughout books, lectures, and interviews over the course of the last several years. This work is critically synthesized in conjunction with her work on mourning and precarious lives. By developing an anti‐anthropocentric understanding of mourning and precarious lives, this article hopes to create ontological, ethical, and political concepts that resist the violence of the present. In so doing, the article contrasts Butler's understanding of precarious life with Giorgio Agamben's understanding of bare life in order to conceive of precariousness as constitutive of social reality. This intellectual labor lays the groundwork for understanding mourning the lives of other animals as a political act that produces new communities, rather than as an individuating and isolating emotion.

In this article, I consider the harms inflicted upon transgender persons through “misgendering,” that is, such deployments of gender terms that diminish transgender persons' self‐respect, limit the discursive resources at their disposal to define their own gender, and cause them microaggressive psychological harms. Such deployments are morally contestable, that is, they can be challenged on ethical or political grounds. Two characterizations of “woman” proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. When we consider what would happen to transgender women upon the broad implementation of these characterizations within transgender women's social context, we discover that they suffer from two defects: they either exclude at least some transgender women, or else they implicitly foster hierarchies among women, marginalizing transgender women in particular. In conclusion, I claim that the moral contestability of gender‐term deployments acts as a stimulus to regularly consider the provisionality and revisability of our deployments of the term “woman.”

The essay theorizes the logic of masculinist protection as an apparently benign form of male domination. It then argues that authoritarian government is often justified through a logic of masculinist protection, and that this is the form of justification for the security regime that has emerged in the United States since September 11, 2001. 1 argue that those who live under a security regime live within an oppressive protection racket. The paper ends by cautioning feminists not ourselves to adopt a stance of protector toward women in so-called less developed societies.

A feminist ethics that bases morality on dependence or vulnerability challenges the moral priority of uniform over disparate treatment. Persons with disabilities resist equality's homogenization of moral personhood. But displacing equality in favor of caring or trust reprises the repression of those already marginalized. The ethics of difference proves an ineffective remedy for the negative consequences attendant on how historically marginalized groups are different. An historicized conception of equality resolves the dilemma.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary democratic theory gives insufficient attention to the important contributions dissenting citizens make to democratic life. Guided by the dissident practices of activist women, I devefop a more expansive conception of citizenship that recognizes dissent and an ethic of political courage as vital elements of democratic participation. I illustrate how this perspective on citizenship recasts and rechims women's courageous dissidence by reconsidering the well-known story of Rosa Parks.

The paper argues that care ethics should be subsumed under virtue ethics by construing care as an important virtue. Doing so allows us to achieve two desirable goals. First, we preserve what is important about care ethics (for example, its insistence on particularity, partiality, emotional engagement, and the importance of care to our moral lives). Second, we avoid two important objections to care ethics, namely, that it neglects justice, and that it contains no mechanism by which care can be regulated so as not to be become morally corrupt.

A continuing concern of many feminists and non-feminists alike has been to identify a distinctive feminist method of inquiry. This essay argues that this method question is misguided and should be abandoned. In doing so it takes up the distinctions between and relationships among methods, methodologies and epistemologies; proposes that the concern to identify sources of the power of feminist analyses motivates the method question; and suggests how to pursue this project.

Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied. My aim is not to suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence; the politics of citation; and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning‐making. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely.

If there actually is a third wave of feminism, it is too close to the second wave for its definition to be clear and uncontroversial, a fact which emphasizes the political nature ofdechring the existence of this third wave. Through an examination of some third wave literature, a case is made for emphasizing the continuity of the second and third waves without blurring the differences between older and younger feminists.