In this article I defend an account of beauty labor as a form of resistance that can enable individuals and communities to combat body oppression. Focusing on the “Fuck Flattering!” movement, a social-media-driven movement in which fat people purposefully wear unflattering clothing to resist antifat fashion and oppressive body standards, I first set three criteria necessary for an act of beauty labor to count as one of resistance. I argue that (1) the agent in question must be situated as a less ideal candidate for attributions of beauty, (2) the agent must have some level of knowledge or awareness of the norms (defined in light of dominant groups) and their harms, and (3) that knowledge or awareness of the harms of said norms must inform the agent's act of beauty labor. Based on this account of beauty labor as resistance, I argue that beauty labor can combat larger systems of oppression and incite meaningful change insofar as it enables individuals to claim and reclaim space (both digital and physical) from which fat people have been historically excluded, while affording an opportunity for education and unpacking of oppression and bias, and expanding the fashion industry.

The recent debate in feminist philosophy about an adequate concept of woman presupposes the distinction between sex and gender, and most proposals operate on the gender level. Building on Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi suggested an account of “woman” that does not rely on the distinction between sex and gender (Moi 1999a). She criticizes that this distinction suggests too strong a separation between the bodily and social dimensions of a person's identity. Instead, her account of “woman” centers around the phenomenological concept of the “body as situation” or the lived/living body (Leib). This understanding of the body emphasizes a person's subjective experience of their own body rather than a third-personal (for example, medical) perspective on humans’ bodies. With her proposal, Moi aims, on the one hand, to resist biological determinism, and, on the other, to avoid the dualism of the sex/gender distinction. In this article, I re-introduce Moi's position to the recent debate and examine how it fares regarding the “inclusion problem” (Katharine Jenkins) toward trans women. I suggest that Moi's account provides resources for an attractive, individualistic, and hence inclusive account of embodied gender identity. For political purposes, however, we also need to analyze concrete contexts of gender-related oppression.

Philosophical inquiry strives to be the unencumbered exploration of ideas. That is, unlike scientific research, which is subject to ethical oversight, it is commonly thought that it would either be inappropriate, or that it would undermine what philosophy fundamentally is, if philosophical research were subject to similar ethical oversight. Against this, I argue that philosophy is in need of a reckoning. Philosophical inquiry is a morally hazardous practice with its own risks. There are risks present in the methods we employ, risks inherent in the content of the views under consideration, and risks to the subjects of our inquiry. Likely, there are more risks still. However, by starting with the identification of these three risks we can demonstrate not only why an ethics of practice is needed but also which avenues are the most promising for developing an ethics for philosophical practice. Although we might just be in the business of asking questions, we do not merely, in virtue of engaging in philosophical inquiry, absolve ourselves of responsibility for the risks that inquiry incurs.

This article argues that shifts between deontological and virtue-ethical moral reasoning hamper public moral conversations about misogyny and racism. Using examples ranging from sexual assault to police violence, I show that when someone is accused of committing a moral wrong, they often respond by shifting from deontological to virtue-ethical modes of analysis. This kind of “toggling” between the two enables a person to claim that they are “a good person” even when they have violated important moral rules. In this way, toggling shuts down or makes incoherent our efforts to call one another to moral account, especially (but by no means exclusively) when we are attempting to address issues of systemic oppression and discrimination, including misogyny and racism.

In the face of media attention that has recently spotlighted police brutality, racialized COVID-19 deaths, and the renewed visibility of white-supremacy groups, scholars, tech entrepreneurs, and media pundits are calling for an increase in empathy, claiming that it may move white and non-Black people of color beyond feelings of pity to dismantling anti-Black racism. However, in the context of anti-Blackness, is racial empathy possible? And what can we expect from it? Examining philosophical critiques of empathy's capabilities by philosophers and scholars engaged in feminist philosophy and Black studies, alongside Heidi Maibom's four-part definition of empathy, I focus on what empathy's limitations might tell us about the emotional and material structures that prevent empathy from achieving the results its advocates often hope for. I argue that the feelings of racial empathy, which may activate in empathy-inducing activities, may instead paradoxically point to the very anti-Black psychological structures that prevent empathetic action. I also contend that the feelings of racial empathy do not themselves undo the relations of anti-Blackness, but tracing the racism implicit in their activation may serve as a self-reflexive tool, an ongoing process, for understanding how anti-Blackness has shaped one's sense of self, embodied awareness, and lifeworld.

This article looks at the implications of medical colonialism in Canada for the feminist concept of care. Because medical colonialism is an ongoing material relation where “good” settler care cannot be separated from Indigenous dispossession, I defend the view that care and violence can be coextensive and suggest that a decolonial care ethic needs to disrupt the directionality of care as flowing from agential carers toward colonized care-receivers. I argue that contemporary medical colonialism should indeed be understood as a form of care if structural harm is to be addressed in practice, and trouble the notion of inclusion at work in some contemporary theories of care. By finding demands for assimilationist “participatory inclusion” in examples of government-run, Indigenous-serving care services, I caution against the implicit settler-colonial assumptions in notions of “caring democracies” and “caring societies” on the welfare-state model. If care is political and can participate in the normative pressures of civic assimilation, then to “decolonize” it through refraction, disruption, infiltration, disconnection, re-appropriation, and resistance also means to “decolonize” citizenship and civic life in the interests of Indigenous self-determination, rather than presumed inclusion in settler-state processes.

Scholarship on prominent women's organizations of the early twentieth century highlights how American and European suffragists participated in and published reports about one another's activities. Less well-known are the exciting circuits of exchange that took place between women in Asia and Africa in spaces emerging out of colonial modernity. In this article, I explore how such circuits evoke cultural institutions embedded within shared histories of courtly patronage of the performing arts and rhetoric. To this end, I posit the mehfil as an alternative paradigm to capture how women's ideational networks operated within the Perso-Arabic sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. The mehfil, in addition to delineating neglected circuits of women's intellectual exchanges, also demonstrates how such exchanges, if attended to, pose certain tensions with known feminist histories. By broadening the definition of who we think of as early women activists or as pioneers of women's intellectual networks, it interrogates and intervenes within our understanding of first-wave feminisms. By foregrounding the interaction of claims for gender justice with anti-imperialist discourse, the mehfil provides an early model of women's collectivity that hinges not on demands for suffrage or other legislative reform, but on critique of colonial patriarchy.

Alex Byrne contends that women are (simply) adult human females, claiming that this thesis has considerably greater initial appeal than the justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge. This article refutes Byrne's thesis in the same way the JTB theory of knowledge is widely thought to have been refuted: through simple counterexamples. Lessons are drawn. One lesson is that women need not be human. A second lesson is that biology and physical phenotypes are both irrelevant to whether someone is a woman, and indeed, female in a gendered sense. A third lesson is that trans women, cis women, alien women, and robot women are all women because to be a woman is to be an adult gendered female. This article does not purport to settle complex normative questions of ethics or justice, including whether the ordinary meaning of woman ought to be retained or changed—though I do note plausible implications for these debates. This article does purport to settle what the ordinary meaning of woman is, and in that regard contribute to important conceptual ground-clearing regarding what constitutes an ameliorative or revisionary definition of woman.

The gray area of sexual violations generally refers to ambiguous sexual experiences that are not readily distinguishable from rape or sex. Such experiences are describable as ambiguous or complex in a way that, to some, seems to defy existent categories of sexual experiences. This leads some feminists to approach the gray area as a puzzle that must be resolved either by understanding it as a new category, or by upholding existing rape categorization. Rather than dispelling the gray-area ambiguity by resolving conceptual puzzles, I assign the gray-area ambiguity a positive analytical role by attending to it in a historical and dialectical light. By tracing histories of feminist antirape discourse, I elaborate a way of understanding the “gray area” of sexual violations, articulating it as a historical condition affecting the interpretive possibilities of our sexual experiences. Such an approach underscores the potential of the gray area to inaugurate feminist critique in virtue of its status as a historically specific yet ambiguous horizon where our experiences can contradictorily seem not-like rape, but not-like sex.

The consequences of colonization have been linked to dehumanizing effects on a given people, but they can also be linked to a discourse that favors “depletion” of natural resources as their “utilization.” This article examines colonization as a subtle process of cultural devastation and ecological hegemony in the light of the memoir Unbowed by the late Nobel laureate from Africa, Wangari Maathai. 1Apart from framing the entire discussion with regard to the impact of colonization on environmental degradation, it also provides a glimpse into Maathai's life and works. We have attempted to analyze her thoughts and the efforts shared in her autobiography regarding the conservation of nature and natural resources, from her experiences stretching from the colonial to the postcolonial era.

Hermeneutical injustice, as a species of epistemic injustice, is when members of marginalized groups are unable to make their experiences communicatively intelligible due to a deficiency in collective hermeneutical resources, where this deficiency is traditionally interpreted as a lack of concepts. Against this understanding, this article argues that even if adequate concepts that describe marginalized groups’ experiences are available within the collective hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice can persist. This article offers an analysis of how this can happen by introducing the notion of hermeneutical excess: the introduction of additional concepts into collective hermeneutical resources that function to obscure agents’ understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized groups. The injustice of hermeneutical excesses happens not due to hermeneutical marginalization (the exclusion of members of marginalized groups from the construction of hermeneutical resources), but rather from hermeneutical domination: when members of dominant groups have been inappropriately included in the construction of hermeneutical resources. By taking as exemplary cases the concepts of “reverse racism” and “nonconsensual sex,” this article shows how such excesses are introduced as a kind of defensive strategy used by dominant ideologies precisely when progress with social justice is made.

I've been thinking quite a lot of late about how, as a settler, I can more fully and effectively support Indigenous peoples struggling for climate justice. In the process, I've found Andrea Sullivan-Clarke's recent insights about decolonizing allyship most helpful. After offering a brief summary of the necessary and sufficient conditions Sullivan-Clarke identifies for decolonizing allyship, I reflect on how I personally can strive to meet these conditions while remaining aware that—like my recovery from alcoholism—my work will never be complete.