Standard accounts of shame characterize it as an emotion of global negative self‐assessment, in which an individual necessarily accepts or assents to a global negative self‐evaluation. According to nonstandard accounts of shame, experiences of shame need not involve a global negative self‐assessment. I argue here in favor of nonstandard accounts of shame over standard accounts. First, I begin with a detailed discussion of standard accounts of shame, focusing primarily on Gabriele Taylor's standard account (Taylor 1985). Second, I illustrate how Adrian Piper's experience of groundless shame can be portrayed as 1) both a rational and an irrational experience of shame, in accordance with Taylor's account as a paradigm model of standard accounts of shame, and 2) as a rational experience of shame when taken in its own right as a legitimate, rational account of shame (Piper 1992/1996). Third, without denying that some experiences of shame either are or can be irrational experiences of shame, I elucidate how standard accounts of shame can act as mechanisms of epistemic injustice, and in doing so can transmute the righteous indignation of the marginalized by recasting them as shameful experiences (that is, by recasting them as experiences of the righteous shame of the marginalized).

I expand upon Kristie Dotson's concept of “epistemic violence” by identifying another type of epistemic violence that arises in the context of nonverbal communication. “Emotional misperception,” as I call it, occurs when the following conditions are met: (1) A misreads B's nonlinguistic expression of emotion, (2) owing to reliable ignorance, (3) harming B.

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought (Butler 2000). In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world.

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.

Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist uses.

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in terms of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology.

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.

There have been many attempts to define care in terms of the virtues, but meta‐analyses of these attempts are conspicuously absent from the literature. No taxonomies have been offered to situate them within the broader care ethical and virtue theoretical discourses, nor have any substantial discussions of each option's merits and shortcomings. I attempt to fill this lacuna by presenting an analysis of the claim that care is a virtue (what I call the “virtue thesis” about care). I begin by distinguishing weaker and stronger versions of the virtue thesis, arguing that the weaker version is an orthodox view among care ethicists. I then go on to develop a taxonomy of approaches available to care ethicists seeking to flesh out the virtue thesis. The three I identify are analogical approaches, according to which care is analogous to some existing virtue; supplementalist approaches, according to which care is a novel virtue; and cardinalist approaches, according to which care is a cardinal virtue. Following this, I defend the virtue thesis from some foreseeable objections and argue that its most promising version is analogical.

Teresa of Avila's desire for suffering cannot be interpreted as the mere passive assumption of a feminine sacrificial role. On the contrary, Teresa was able to transform her suffering into the incarnated performance of her relationship with God: By desiring suffering and by understanding it and her ability to confront it as proof of divine love, she was able to reinforce her self‐confidence and strength. This article discusses Teresa of Avila's experience and interpretation of suffering in the context of the female ascetic‐mystic Christian tradition. It criticizes Teresa's positive conceptualization of suffering but examines in depth the potential of her ability to actively manage and control it. Although Teresa was able to affirm her personality through ascetic practices such as self‐humiliation and mortification, the general applicability of such practices to the management of suffering is fraught since they leave the suffering individual in a vulnerable position. Although Teresa of Avila finds fulfillment and, paradoxically, self‐actualization through self‐denial and the surrender of her will, such practices entail the substantial risk of total self‐annihilation.

Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists.

Feminist philosophy has offered mixed opinions on the collaborative projects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But although there has been much discussion of the political expediency of what Deleuze and Guattari do say about sexual difference, this article will outline what is absent from Anti‐Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (the two volumes comprising Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Specifically, I will argue that though Deleuze and Guattari offer a historical account of a range of power structures—most notably capitalism, but also despotism, fascism, and authoritarianism—they give no such account of the development of patriarchy. Secondarily, this article will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of contemporary power relations could be improved by adding an accompanying analysis of the institution of patriarchy. After offering a detailed account of the technical vocabulary used by Deleuze and Guattari for the analysis of political institutions, I will argue that what their work requires is an account of how patriarchy is historically produced by an “abstract machine” of masculinity. This article will finish with some suggestions for the way that such an account could be given via an analysis of the abstract machine of phallusization.

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly.

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.

A dominant area of inquiry within intergenerational ethics concerns how goods (and bads) ought to be justly distributed between noncontemporaries. Contractualist theories of justice that have broached these discussions have often centered on the concepts of mutual advantage and (indirect) reciprocal cooperation between rational, self‐interested beings. However, another prominent reason that many in the present feel that they have obligations toward future generations is not due to self‐interested reciprocity, but simply because they care about what happens to them. Care ethics promises to be conceptually well‐suited for articulating this latter reason: given that future generations are in a perpetual condition of dependency on present‐day people's actions, this is precisely the kind of relational structure that care theorists should be interested in morally evaluating. Unfortunately, the care literature has been largely silent on intergenerational ethics. This article aims to advance this literature, offering the blueprints of what a care ethic concerning future generations—a “future care ethic”—should look like. The resultant ethic defends a sufficientarian theory of obligation: people in the present ought to ensure the conditions needed to encourage and sustain a world that enables good caring relations to flourish.

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: (1) her explicit commitment to educational equality, and (2) her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman uses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès in The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to society. Although many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education.

Countering hegemonic understandings of rage as a deleterious emotion, this article examines rage across specific sites of trans cultural production—the prison letters of CeCe McDonald and the durational performance art of Cassils—in order to argue that it is integral to trans survival and flourishing. Theorizing rage as a justified response to unlivable circumstances, a response that plays a key role in enabling trans subjects to detach from toxic relational dynamics in order to transition toward other forms of gendered subjectivity and intimate communality, I develop an account of what I call an “infrapolitical ethics of care” that indexes a web of communal practices that empathetically witness and amplify rage, as well as support subjects during and after moments of grappling with overwhelming negative affect. I draw on the work of trans, queer, and feminist theorists who have theorized the productivities of so‐called “negative” affects, particularly Sara Ahmed's work on willfulness and killing joy (2014), María Lugones's writing on anger (2003), Judith Butler's Spinozan reassessment of the vexed relations between self‐preservation and self‐destruction (2015), and the rich account of trans rage provided by Susan Stryker (1994).

This article explores the relation among illness, home, and belonging. Through a feminist phenomenological framework, I describe the disorientations of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and living with mental illness. This research anticipates the consequences of illness and serious (bodily) disorientations for a conception of belonging as seamless body–world compatibility. Instead, this article examines how the (in)stability of bodily dwellings in experiences of disorientation can suggest ways of being in the world that are more attentive to interdependency, unpredictability, and change in human experience. I argue that these types of dwellings function as a more capacious and apposite metaphor to account for variations in belonging. This discussion outlines the ethical importance of building worlds that make room for different ways of being at home in and through our interactions with others. Although my discussion does not supply norms for ethical action, I contend that a feminist phenomenology of illness generates saliences and illuminates sensibilities that can transform our ways of being with others.