The problem of our age is womanhood … it will take the next century to work it out as in its inner meaning, and in references to the eternal principles which alone will lead us to its final and triumphant solution.

This essay considers whether liberal political theory has tools with which to count gender, and so gender relations, as political. Can liberal political theory count sub-ordination among the harms of sex inequality that the state ought to correct? Watson defends a version of deliberative democracy—liberalism—as able to place issues of social inequality in the form of hierarchical social identities at the center of its normative commitments, and so at the center of securing justice.

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity.

Margaret Cavendish is known for her personal allegiance to monarchy in England. This is reflected in her writings; as Hobbes did, she tended to criticize severely any attempt at rebellion and did not think England could become a republic. Yet it seems that Cavendish did have sympathy with some republican values, in particular, as Lisa Walters has argued, with the republican concept of freedom as nondomination. How can we explain this apparent inconsistency? I believe that the answer lies in a lack of fit between the republican theories that were available to her and the values she accepted and according to which she was expected to live her life.

Anna Doyle Wheeler was a nineteenth‐century, Irish‐born socialist and feminist. She and another Irish‐born socialist and feminist, William Thompson, produced a book‐length critique in 1825, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government,” to refute the claims of liberal philosopher James Mill in 1820 that women did not need to be enfranchised. In so doing the Appeal undermined the philosophical credibility of Mill's liberal utilitarianism. The Appeal exposed the hypocrisy of the language of contract (whether social, sexual, or marriage) by showing that men's freedom and claims to rights presupposed the unfreedom and sexual subjugation of women. The article argues that the Appeal was an original formulation of feminist political theory that still retains its relevance in the twenty‐first century.

This article treats ambiguous heterosexual experiences—not quite rape, but not quite “just sex” either—as a form of domination, distinct from both coercion and productive power. It argues that if we wish to make sense of the power dynamics involved in these experiences, it may be useful to view the domination that takes place as a kind of interpellation, understood in the Althusserian sense as a mutually constitutive dynamic in which ideologies create “good subjects,” and subjects reproduce ideology. Considering heterosexual domination as a form of Althusserian interpellation enables us to see the power in question as an embodied, intersubjective relation that demands the complicity of dominated persons, with lasting effects on their subjectivity. This approach avoids positing the dominated as helpless victims or passive objects, while bearing witness to and shedding light on their experiences.

Focusing on a textbook controversy that emerged in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, Mason explores the discursive production of white ethnicity in the rhetorical, visual, and political strategies used during an organized protest against the new multicultural curriculum adopted by the local school board. What the author finds puzzling is the ways in which these productions of “soul” and “nation” enabled unlikely political alliances between national conservative elites and the local, historically left-leaning working class protesters. The author argues that “soul” is reproduced through racialized discourse signifying the spiritual and ethnic purity of whiteness, the consolidation of white ethnicity, and the spirit of white resistance, articulated through campaigns to save children from future captivity in an “alien” world. Through this on-site theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates how a right-wing narrative of victimhood facilitates the reproduction of ethnic identification among the protesters, whose whiteness apparently can be jeopardized by reading the “wrong” books.

In 2013 the mayor's office of Bogotá organized the first ever Mujer T. The event, originally conceived as a beauty pageant, generated considerable controversy. Unexpectedly, however, most of the criticism came not from conservative groups, but from well‐known cisgender feminist scholars who criticized the event from a traditional gender perspective. A heated debate about the needs, challenges, desires, and opportunities of trans women continued during the weeks prior to the event. The discussion played out through blogs, social media, and private and public conversations. Nevertheless, although there was much talk about transwomen, there was little room for their voices. This article argues that because of the actors involved, the dynamics and content of the conversations, and the changes that took place in its aftermath, Mujer T 2013 highlights how trans people's bodies, expressions—whether related to gender, culture, or politics—and self‐determination processes are intensely policed and contested, even by those whose explicit intent is to support and celebrate them. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of what happened around Mujer T 2013 has important lessons for the development of trans‐inclusive policies and initiatives, feminist scholarship and practice, and institutional and societal change.

This paper theorizes and defends a process I term “hermeneutical bastardization.” This concept tracks the way in which some hermeneutical injustices arise not from a gap in a shared pool of hermeneutical resources, but from the decontextualization of an advantageous hermeneutical resource into another (typically dominant) hermeneutical domain. This decontextualization bastardizes hermeneutical resources by severing the concept from its original meaning and significance. I focus on the term “trans woman” and examine the way in which dominant epistemic agents rewrite and redefine the concept according to prominent and prevalent pernicious representations. Specifically, once decontextualized, the term “trans woman” denotes an individual who is thoroughly erotic and sexual in nature. Hermeneutical bastardization can illuminate how hermeneutically marginalized groups are reconstructed by other dominant epistemic agents according to these pernicious representations and can be silenced whilst their concepts, or rather their terms, are being utilized in sets of dominant hermeneutical resources in ways that severely diverge from their original intra-communal conceptualization. This type of hermeneutical injustice does not arise from a lacuna in our set of resources, but instead depends on the uptake of a concept's term and its subsequent decontextualization.

Research into war rape has shown that rape is not incidental to the general violence of war but is instead an integral part of war strategies. Such research makes it clear that in the context of war, rape serves to injure women on an individual level, but has the more strategic effect of fracturing communal bonds. Similarly, the growing body of research investigating the reasons for, and consequences of, the rape of lesbian women, indicates that these rapes have far-reaching consequences for lesbian communities and serves to reinforce patriarchal heteronormativity. While there is much research around both war and lesbo-phobic rape, the aim of this paper is to bring this research together in order examine lesbo-phobic rape through the lens of war rape theory. This paper aims to show how both “forms” of rape appear to hinge on the meanings assigned to women during peacetime and how both lead to the destruction of individual victims and their communities, while bolstering the subjectivities of the perpetrators and increasing the bonds of those complicit in such violence. The use of the theoretical understandings of war rape thus enriches the understandings of lesbo-phobic rape and shows that there are many continuities between the two.

Indigenous language activists talk about incommensurability all the time—in interesting ways that link language and knowledge as components of Indigenous lifeways that can't be disentangled. According to many of these scholar-activists, what is untranslatable about Indigenous languages is often what is incommensurate about Indigenous worlds. Drawing upon resources from Indigenous language-reclamation work, I outline here a nonexhaustive taxonomy of incommensurability in the literature about Indigenous philosophy of language, and gesture at the ways coalitional relationships might be built that hold space for these different varieties of incommensurability. For ease of explication and to honor Indigenous ways of knowing, I employ here an organizational metaphor rooted in my own communities’ traditions of canoe-voyaging to organize three forms of incommensurability that emerge from Indigenous philosophies of language: impassable incommensurability and strategic impassable incommensurability (big water through a rock garden), as well as incommensurability with technical passage: (heavy water through a rock garden). These forms of incommensurability, as they spring from Indigenous philosophies of language, lend themselves toward nuanced insights for careful and considerate world-traveling (à la Lugones) that holds space for epistemic and linguistic sovereignty.

In this short essay, I report results from a representative national dataset (n > 7,300) from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program that shows that significantly more men than women intend to major in philosophy at the high‐school and pre‐university level. This lends credence to pre‐university effects hypotheses of women's underrepresentation in philosophy and successfully replicates a smaller analysis performed by Cheshire Calhoun at Colby College in 2009. I also defend my analysis against an objection that claims that intention to major is not a good predictor of final major selection. Finally, I argue that this new analysis should lead to further investment in university‐level diversity programs.

This paper relates Arendt's critique of a labor society to her thoughts on the “good life.” I begin with the claim that in the post-mass production era, Western societies, traditionally centered around gainful employment, encounter a decrease in the relevance of labor and can thus no longer rely on it as a resource for individual or social meaning. From Arendt's perspective, however, the current situation allows for the possibility of a transition from a society based on labor to a society centered around activities. I explore Arendt's different types of activities—labor, work, action—with respect to the question of justice between the genders.

Drawing on the work of Irigaray and Levinas, this paper discusses the ethical limitations of Lacan's “mirror-stage” dynamic and interpolates a different interpretation of the material he uses to elaborate his theory. Close attention is paid to the significance of metaphors of vision and touch in the work of the three philosophers. The paper develops into an analysis of bigamy's and Levinas's interpretations of touch as the differential site of ethics.

Feminist epistemology aims to propose epistemic reasons for increasing the representation of women or socially subordinated people in science. This is typically done—albeit often only implicitly—by positing a causal mechanism through which the representation of sociodemographic minorities exerts a positive effect on scientific advancement. Two types of causal theories can be identified. The “epistemic diversity thesis” presents a causal path from sociodemographic diversity to scientific progress mediated by epistemic diversity. The “thesis of epistemic advantage” proposes a causal path from social subjugation to capacity for inquiry. The latter theory is defined with substantial ambiguity in the existing literature, and I present an explicit causal reformulation that disambiguates it. The epistemic diversity thesis focuses on the effect of group composition on collective epistemic performance and is largely silent about what kind of characteristics lead to individual epistemic excellence. On the other hand, the thesis of epistemic advantage seeks to identify sociodemographic background conditions that make certain epistemic agents strictly better knowers or inquirers than others and pays little attention to the synergistic effects of diverse group composition. Such a difference in the causal structure reflects the diverging political characteristics of the two theories.