In this essay, I attempt to outline a feminist philosophical approach to the current debate concerning (allegedly) false memories of childhood sexual abuse. Bringing the voices of feminist philosophers to bear on this issue highlights the implicit and sometimes questionable epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical-political commitments of some therapists and scientists involved in these debates. It also illuminates some current debates in and about feminist philosophy.

As third wave feminist philosophers attending graduate schools in different parts of the country, we decided to use our e-mail discussion as the format for presenting our thinking on the subject of third wave feminism. Our analogue takes us through the subjects of postmodernism, the relationship between theory and practice, the generation gap, and the power relations associated with feminist philosophy as an established part of the academy.

We contest each other's memory claims all the time. I am concerned with how the contesting of memory claims and narratives may be an integral part of many abusive situations. I use the writings of Otto Weininger and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to explore a particular strategy of discrediting women as rememberers, making them more vulnerable to sexual harm. This strategy relies on the presentation of women as unable to maintain a stable enough sense of self or identity to be trustworthy testifiers to their own harm.

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of “dialogue” with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called “hypothetical construction,” in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of the differences of others.

The aim of this paper is to show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been mistakenly interpreted as a theory of gender, because interpreters have failed adequately to understand Beauvoir's aims. Beauvoir is not trying to explain facts, events, or states of affairs, but to reveal, unveil, or uncover (découvrir) meanings. She explicates the meanings of woman, female, and feminine. Instead of a theory, Beauvoir's book presents a phenomenological description of the sexual difference.

This essay distinguishes three types of appeals to experience in ethics, identifies problems with appealing to experience, and argues that appeals to experience must be open to critical assessment, if experientially-based arguments are to be useful. Unless competing and potentially irreconcilable experiences can be assessed and adjudicated, experientially-based arguments will be problematic. The paper recommends thinking of the appeal to experience as a kind of story telling to be evaluated as other stories are.

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.

Identity politics deployed by lesbian feminists of color challenges the philosophy of the subject and white feminisms based on sisterhood, and in so doing opens a space where feminist coalition building is possible. I articulate connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's epistemological-political action tools of complex identity narration and mestiza form of intersubject, Nancy Hartsock's feminist materialist standpoint, and Seyla Benhabib's standpoint of intersubjectivity in relation to using feminist identity politics for feminist coalition politics.

Elements comprising a set of building blocks for a feminist reconstruction of citizenship might include: a critical synthesis of citizenship as a status and a practice; strengthening the inclusive side of citizenship (within and across nation-states); the principle of differentiated universalism, addressing tensions between an analysis grounded in difference and the universalism standing at the heart of citizenship; and a challenge to the binary thinking that constrains the articulation of women's claims to citizenship.

The distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality does not allow for sufficient attention to be given to the question of non-normative heterosexualities. This paper develops a feminist critique of normative sexuality, focusing on alternative readings of sex and/or gender offered by Beauvoir and Irigaray. Despite their differences, both accounts contribute significantly to dismantling the lure of normative sexuality in heterosexual relations—a dismantling necessary to the construction of a feminist social and political order.

The term “third wave” within contemporary feminism presents some initial difficulties in scholarly investigation. Located in popular-press anthologies, tines, punk music, and cyberspace, many third wave discourses constitute themselves as a break with both second wave and academic feminisms; a break problematic for both generations of feminists. The emergence of third wave feminism offers academic feminists an opportunity to rethink the context of knowledge production and the mediums through which we disseminate our work.

Drawing from four Arenaaan themes—plurality, the public realm, power, and perspective appreciation—I argue for citizenship as a “politics of enlarged mentality.” This term suggests an alternative conception of citizenship that surpasses the limits of both the liberal and civic republican traditions. Unlike die masculinized liberal ideal of the citizen and contrary to the gendered universality that defines the civic republican traditions, a politics based on enlarged mentality combines context sensitivity with principled judgments.

This essay focuses on the repeated rhetorical moves through which the third wave autobiographical subject seeks to be real and to speak as part ofacolhctive voice from the next feminist generation. Given that postmodernist, postructuralist, and multi-culturalist critiques have shaped the form and the content of third wave expressions of the personal., the study is ultimately concerned with the possibilities and limitations of such theoretical analysis for a third wave of feminist praxis.

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

In this paper I argue that the distinction between epistemic privilege and epistemic authority is an important one for feminist epistemologists who are sympathetic to feminist standpoint theory, I argue that, while the first concept is elusive, the second is really the important one for a successful feminist standpoint project.