I offer here an analysis of contemporary foundation garments while exploring the ways in which these garments encourage, reinforce and protect normative femininity. In examining the performatives of contemporary normative, ideal femininity as they perpetuate inhibited intentionality, ambiguous transcendence, and discontinuous unity, I look to the possibility for subversive performativity vis-à-vis the strengths of women in order to proliferate categories of gender and to potentially displace current notions of what it means to become woman.

In the volatile conflicts that inaugurated the twenty‐first century, secularism, democracy, and freedom were identified by Western nation‐states as symbolizing their civilizational values, in contrast to the fanaticism, misogyny, and homophobia they attributed to “Islam.” The figure of the Muslim was thus transformed into an existential threat. This paper analyzes an exchange among scholars—Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech—that engages these highly contested issues. As such, the text provides a rare opportunity to study how particular significations of the West, its epistemological tradition, and its relation with Islam are contested and negotiated in a critically engaged site during a moment of global crisis. My reading of the text leads me to argue that the stabilization of the epistemic power of the West is presently reliant on a new iteration of its foundational philosophical concepts to suppress counter‐hegemonic narratives that foreground its forms of violence. Further, the terrain for this reshaping of the dominance of this tradition is gender/sexuality, such that queer politics are located at the forefront of the Western politico‐philosophical project. As such, the advancement of this tradition is co‐constitutive with that of the gendered‐sexual subject as emblematic of its highest civilizational values.

This piece is Chapter Two of Jessie Taft's 1913 doctoral dissertation The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.

As radical feminists seeking to overcome the linguistic oppression of women, Rich and Daly apparently shared the same agenda in the late 1970s; but they approached the problem differently, and their paths have increasingly diverged. Whereas Daly's approach to the repossession of language is code-oriented and totalizing, Rich's approach is open-ended and context-oriented. Rich has therefore addressed more successfully than Daly the problem of language in use.

This essay focuses on how we embody the language we speak: how an audience “reads” the body of a speaker as it both constructs the positionality of that speaking subject and construes that subject's discursive authority. Buildingon the work of Linda Brodkey and Michelle Fine, 1 explore what is at stake when university students harass a faculty member by accusing that teacher of not embodying authority in the proper form (body).

In a comment on my paper, “Moral Understandings: Alternative Epistemology for a Feminist Ethics” (1989) Ralph Lindgren questions the wisdom of confronta' tional rhetoric in my paper and much feminist moral philosophy, and the consistency of this stance with pluralism about ethics. I defend both the rebellious rhetoric and the inclusivity of my own approach, but suggest that pluralism in moral philosophy is harder to define than Lindgren's comments suggest.

This paper on Ofelia Schutte's work discusses five main themes: gender oppression in the context of Latin American theories of social liberation; normative heterosexuality in Beauvoir and Irigaray; Schutte's analysis of women and capitalist globalization processes; her work on cultural identities; and the possibility of feminist transnational identities. 1 conclude with a comment on her postcolonial epistemological method in addressing cultural incommensurability and the possibility of a common agenda for transnational feminism.

Catharine Beecher held that women possessed a moral power that could allow them to play a vital role in the moral and social progress of nineteenth century America. Problematically, this power could only be obtained through their subordination to the greatest social happiness. I wish to argue that this notion of subordination, properly framed within her ethico-religious system, can in fact lead to economic independence for women and a surprisingly robust conception of moral power.

The fight for emancipation takes place on different levels, and one of them is the level of contemporary financial capitalism as debt‐economy. Debt can be a major tool of control and exploitation in that it produces subordinate subjects situated in exchange relations of debt and credit. Recent work on financial debt and the debt‐economy has, however, not taken gender adequately into account in philosophical definitions of indebted subjects. Gender analysis discloses how the debtor–creditor relationship is based on a contractarian idea of the indebted subject as an autonomous moral agent (Pateman and Mills 2007), and on a masculine, that is, a‐relational understanding of what counts as debt and what does not in the contemporary debt‐economy. In contrast to atomistic notions of the subject in liberal, contractarian theories (deriving from Locke and Hobbes), relational notions of the subject as advanced in care ethics are a better point of departure for capturing the interdependence of subjects within a debt‐economy as a core feature of a nonsustainable monetary system. On the basis of such analysis, care ethics also offers means for imagining ways of emancipation from private and public problem credit in order to make financial systems more sustainable and more just.

In this paper I lay out what 1 take to be the crucial insights in Susan Bordo's “Feminist Skepticism and the ‘Maleness’ of Philosophy” and point out some additional difficulties with the skeptical position. I call attention to an ambiguity in the nature or content of the “maleness” of philosophy that Bordo identifies. Finally, I point out that, unlike some feminist skeptics, Bordo never loses sight in her work of women's lived experiences.