Archives

• Vol. 11 No. 1 (2025)

  This first issue of 2025 includes five peer-reviewed articles. In the first article, "The Role of a Lifetime: Trans Experience and Gender Norms," Rowan Bell argues against the view that individuals respond to gender norms because the norms match to their gender categories. Bell argues instead for a "traits-based view" that gender norms apply on the basis of gender-coded traits, in part to account for patterns of gender norm responsiveness that do not track assigned gender categories. 

  Our second article is "Disability, Self-Representation, and Care: Nothing about Us without Us," by T.J. Buttgereit, who takes up the tension outlined by philosophers such as Eva Kittay between the value of self-identification for persons with disabilities and the injustices that may be involved in others externally labeling someone as disabled who is incapable of communicating. 

  In our third article, "White Concealment," Kirsten T. Edwards advances inquiry about white ignorance by shifting the focus from what white people refuse to know to consider what white people refuse to say, for example, in the course of constructing a narrative that selectively represents information. White concealment is analyzed in part through a composite story anchoring the conceptual analysis that specifically considers the experiences of Black women in relation to white feminists.

  The fourth article, by Katherine Gasdaglis, is "Whose Anger Matters? Methodological Mistakes in the Philosophy of Emotion." In this paper, Gasdaglis rejects theoretical approaches justifying anger-eliminativism that fail to adopt intersectionality as a maxim of inquiry. Her intersectional approach centers anti-oppression anger and argues that doing so better accounts for the rationality of anger in particular contexts.

  Fifth, Kevin Richardson argues in "The Metaphysics of Gender and the Gender Binary" that patterns of targeted structural violence toward trans and gender-nonconforming people are explained by the gender binary. Richardson urges attention to metaphysical accounts of gender that are not limited to the task of determining who is (or is not) really a member of a gender kind.

   

• Vol. 10 No. 4 (2024)

  This issue at the end of our tenth year includes three peer-reviewed articles followed by an acknowledgment of our past editors, graduate student editorial assistants, and referees who make this journal possible.

  The first article is “The Generative Power of Collective Hope” by Maggie Fife, who provides an account of collective hope, an undertheorized concept in comparison to individual hope. Fife argues that collective hope is possible and motivating of political action, but requires members of a group need to hold hope for the collective.

  In our second article, Ina Hallström develops an account of epistemic practices involved in becoming and being a knower and a patient with endometriosis in “Endo Episteme: Epistemic Injustice and the Misrecognition of Endometriosis.”

  Third, Ege Yumuşak argues for social perspectives as sets of inquiry-structuring questions, in “What’s in a Perspective? Perspectives, Interpretation, and Inquiry.” Yumuşak argues that prevailing accounts cannot predict clashes of social perspective—for example, the perspectival clash between the feminist and the antifeminist—and presents “the agenda view” as an alternative proposal.   

  The final issue of our fifth year included grateful recognition of the referees who served in our first five years. The last item in this issue acknowledges the referees who have served so diligently to realize the efforts of our authors and editors in volumes 6 through 10 of the journal, as well as our past and departing editors and graduate student assistants. Thanks to all who have assisted us in these early years!

• Vol. 10 No. 3 (2024)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue. The first is by Felicity Joseph, who argues in “The Degendering of Virtue: Beauvoir and Wollstonecraft on Virtue and Equality” that despite some differing beliefs and approaches, Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft share an interest in degendering virtue and a rejection of women’s supposed inferior otherness. Joseph argues for the strategy of degendering virtue even if one ultimately concludes that some virtues are gendered.

  Next, in “Be Grateful or Be Quiet: Confronting the Epistemic Harms of Adoptism,” Michele Merritt argues that adopted persons are marginalized in social practices including enforced gratitude and in scholarship that tends to neglect their perspective, increasing the risk of epistemic injustice. Merritt coins the term adoptism to characterize these forms of marginalization.

  In our third article, “Political and Antipolitical Anger: The Challenge of Keeping One’s Anger at Structural Injustice Properly Political,” Jessica Vargas González argues that properly political anger should meet two criteria: fittingness and boundedness. She introduces “a goal-frustration type of anger (as distinct from blaming anger)” to prevent construing anger too narrowly, as always involving moral blame.

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  Revolutionizing Responsibility

  Vol. 10 No. 1/2 (2024)

  This special double issue on moral responsibility is guest-edited by Dr. Mich Ciurria and includes thirteen peer-reviewed papers as well as an introduction by Ciurria. The journal thanks all of the authors and anonymous referees for their contributions to this complex and impressive collection. We extend special appreciation to Mich Ciurria for proposing this special issue and working with so many authors and referees in order to realize this robust contribution to philosophical and feminist scholarship. 

• Vol. 9 No. 4 (2023)

  Readers will find four peer-reviewed articles in this issue. First, in “The Limitations of Duality: Reexamining Sexual Difference in Feminist Philosophies of Nature,” Camilla Pitton advances a critique of what she terms “the duality view,” that is, the perspective she finds in some interpretations of Luce Irigaray’s work that nature is dual and sexed. Whether it is an accurate reading of Irigaray or not, Pitton says, the duality view ought to be rejected, in part because such an account is unable to ground a normative rejection of objectification.

  Second, Marie-Pier Lemay proposes research-guiding principles as one way to conduct research in philosophy, in her article, “Engaged Solidaristic Research: Developing Methodological and Normative Principles for Political Philosophers.” Lemay’s work emerges from the author's qualitative research fieldwork in Senegal and realization of methodological hazards of the kind of work that political philosophers are doing when they're doing engaged philosophy.

  In our third article, Caroline King explores the ways that Paul Preciado’s book Testo yonqui (Testo Junkie) offers a productive lens through which to view transgender theory through heterotopias: worlds within worlds that both mirror and upset the “real” world outside, in “Spaces for Becomings? Heterotopic Fictions in Preciado’s Testo yonqui.”

  Our fourth article, by Tyra Lennie, “Self-Improvement in Astellian Friendship,” argues for Mary Astell’s description of friendship as a self-improvement project available to an agent in a strong community. Lennie relies upon a comparison of Astell’s account of friendship to the function and structure of Epicurean friendship in order to clarify and demonstrate shared themes between these two views of friendship as essentially featuring self-improvement.

• Vol. 9 No. 3 (2023)

  This issue offers readers four peer-reviewed articles. In the first, "Weapon and Shield: Apologies and the Duty to Be Vulnerable," coauthors Barrett Emerick, Katie Stockdale, and Audrey Yap argue for a duty to be vulnerable in the course of issuing apologies, best realized by observing two principles: (1) Apologies must be one-sided and non-transactional, and (2) the wrongdoer must be willing to pay what they owe.

  The second article, "Some Reflections on Gaslighting and Language Games," by Jeff Engelhardt, argues that what they call normative gaslighting on the part of individuals as well as multiple gaslighters occurs systematically. Engelhardt focuses less on what gaslighting is and more on "features of our social systems that make it more common and, in some cases, more vicious."

  In our third article, Laura Wildemann Kane advances the perspective in "Weighing Identity in Procreative Decisions" that procreative decisions take up important aspects of one’s own identity as these are changed, transformed, or affirmed. Kane contends that philosophical arguments about procreation that omit these important considerations offer incomplete accounts of the effects of procreative decisions.

  The fourth article is by Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer, who argues in "Care Exploitation: Taking Advantage of One’s Caring about Another" that caregivers can be unjustly exploited even when they willingly assent to caregiving. They hold that injustice can stem from failure to respect a caregiver's dignity by taking advantage of their vulnerability of "caring about," that is, their concern for and investment in a cared-for subject is leveraged against them to the advantage of another. 

• Vol. 9 No. 2 (2023)

  In this issue, readers will find two unsolicited peer-reviewed articles followed by a special symposium. The first article is by Henrike Kohpeiß, who argues in "Concepts as Shelter: Toward a Feminist Theory of Philosophical Concepts" that concepts may function to protect experiences from being erased. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of concepts and criticizing and extending that work, Kohpeiß shows that concepts have affective dimensions and political implications. The second article is "Gender Essentialisms," by John Horden and Dan López de Sa, and engages in careful criticism of Charlotte Witt's gender uniessentialism. The authors conclude that what is of value in Witt’s account of gender may be endorsed without joining her in denying that gendered social individuals such as women and men are identical to people. 

  The symposium, guest-edited by Kristin Rodier, is a set of reflections on Cressida Heyes’s Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, with introductions by Rodier and Heyes, and a response by Heyes, to the contributions of Megan Burke, Talia Mae Bettcher, and Alisa Bierria. This reflective set of papers are revised and triply anonymous-reviewed versions of commentaries presented at the 2022 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and take up the importance of Heyes's work to a rich variety of considerations: prohibitions against public sleeping, lost consciousness and agency, carceral time, temporal property, and black feminist formation of “revelatory agency.”

• Vol. 9 No. 1 (2023)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue. First, Tamara Fakhoury argues in "Violent Resistance as Radical Choice" that the personal projects and relationships of those who are oppressed may provide reasons to engage in violent resistance. Fakhoury shows that “personal reasons” are not always reducible to paradigmatic moral reasons, in part because some cases of violent resistance under oppression arise from situations of what Susan Wolf calls “radical choice.”

  In our second article, “Supererogatory Duties and Caregiver Heroic Testimony,” Chris Weigel demonstrates, using Dale Dorsey’s account of supererogation, that nurses in the pandemic are both doing their moral duty and also acting supererogatorily. Weigel argues further that when some nurses engage in heroic testimony, the phenomenon of denying that one is a hero when called a hero, we should see their heroic testimony as a resistance to compulsory heroism rather than diminish their sacrifice, say they are confused, or attribute to them a vice.

  Last, Shelby Moser and Michel-Antoine Xhignesse analyze the effects of relegating women in detective fiction to “the cozy mystery,” in “A Garden of One’s Own, or Why Are There No Great Lady Detectives?” Their contention is that lady detectives are not excluded from the company of the paradigmatic greats by their inferior intellects or ingenuity but rather because of oppressive structural factors inherent in the genres to which they are relegated.

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  Feminism, Social Justice, and Artificial Intelligence

  Vol. 8 No. 3/4 (2022)

  This special double issue on artificial intelligence is the culmination of a collaborative effort that began with the 2021 Feminism, Social Justice, and AI workshop organized by Carla Fehr. The collection includes twelve anonymously peer-reviewed papers drawn from workshop participants' submissions and an introduction by issue editor Carla Fehr. The journal thanks the authors and anonymous referees for their contributions to a stimulating and timely issue on a topic of pressing importance.

• Vol. 8 No. 2 (2022)

  In this issue, readers will find three peer-reviewed articles that go remarkably well together. First, Ellie Anderson's article, "A Phenomenological Approach to Sexual Consent," rejects standard accounts of consent as permission-giving and develops an alternative theory of consent that engages with its etymological meaning, “feeling-with,” combining con- (with) and sentire (to feel). Anderson suggests this "approach shifts the distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences away from the legal ___domain and toward an interpersonal one."

  Readers will find the anecdote that begins our second article is likewise interpersonal; in "Why You Ought to Defer: Moral Deference and Marginalized Experience," Savannah Pearlman and Elizabeth Williams argue for a prima facie "duty to defer—both epistemically and actionally—to marginalized people in their moral testimony about harms that relate to their identity when the receiver is not a member of that identity group." They distinguish "epistemic deference from actional deference" in order "to explain the appropriateness of a divergent response . . . to cases that traditional accounts of moral deference must take as all-or-nothing."

  In our third article, "Gender as a Self-Conferred Identity,"Michael Rea argues for an account of gender as a self-conferred identity because it "transparently offers a basis for assigning first-person authority to people’s judgments about their own gender," continuing themes in this issue of deference and first-person lived experience. 

• Vol. 8 No. 1 (2022)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue. First, in "Normative Competence, Autonomy, and Oppression," J. Y. Lee argues against Natalie Stoljar’s normative competence account of autonomy, and advocates for an asymmetry of autonomy between those who oppress others and those who are made the target of oppression.

  Second, Aron Edidin argues in "Epistemic Agency and the Value of Knowledge and Belief" for a "credit-worthiness approach" to the value of knowledge, locating that value in the broad ___domain of epistemic agency. Edidin addresses criticisms of the credit-worthiness account by mobilizing insights from feminist work on relational autonomy.

  Finally, in "Blaming from Inside the Birdcage: Strawsonian Accounts of Blame and Feminist Care Ethics," Amy McKiernan argues for the role of feminist care ethics as a supplement to P. F. Strawson's account of reactive attitudes involved in blame, the better to make sense of the negative emotions present in blaming practices that occur in moral communities operating under oppressive conditions. McKiernan maintains that, when considering our negative reactive attitudes, it is crucial to consider how oppressive power dynamics shape these attitudes and reactions. 

• Vol. 7 No. 4 (2021)

  In our last issue of 2021, readers will find four peer-reviewed articles. In "Hermeneutical Backlash: Trans Youth Panics as Epistemic Injustice," B.R. George and Stacey Goguen advance a novel account of what they call "hermeneutical backlash," in part to identify the strategies and tropes of trans youth panics, and ultimately to encourage philosophers to engage in more work on the dynamics of struggles for (and against) hermeneutical justice.

  In the second article, "On the Epistemology of Trigger Warnings; Or, Why the Coddling Argument against Trigger Warnings Is Misguided," Anna Klieber considers and rejects arguments that trigger warnings "coddle" by allowing people to avoid ideas that they disagree with or find difficult. Klieber concludes that in some cases, trigger warnings might be misused by those who need to learn about topics that might be a trigger for others, and explores alternative approaches.

  Our third article is "Oppressive Praise" by Jules Holroyd, who calls the attention of philosophers who may over-focus on blame to consider analysis of praise, instead. Holroyd argues that praise is often apportioned in ways that reflect and entrench existing structures of oppression.

  Last, Eric Bayruns García argues in "Racial Injustice and Information Flow" for epistemologists' attention to the effects of social injustice on proper information flow about social injustice through a community. Arguing against the possible overfocus on subjects, Bayruns García describes information flow of a specific informational set which is a property of information rather than subjects. We thank our authors and referees for their contributions to the realization of this issue.

• Special Issue: Feminism and Food

  Vol. 7 No. 3 (2021)

  This collection of anonymously peer-reviewed articles is the result of the call for papers inspired by the 2019 meeting of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy hosted by Guelph University, on the topic of feminism and food.

  In our first article, “Moralizing Hunger: Cultural Fatphobia and the Moral Language of Contemporary Diet Culture,” Emma Marija Atherton argues that the moralized vocabularies of online diet communities function to reproduce fatphobia, and she concludes that diet-critical communities address this moralizing of food and inspire more liberatory ways of relating to food and eating.

  Our second article, “Eating as a Self-Shaping Activity: The Case of Young Women’s Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders,” is by Megan Dean, who argues against the hypothesis that young women’s vegetarianism is a sign of disordered eating, in part because wrongly accepting this assumption can damage the moral and epistemic agency of young women and girls. Dean builds on feminist critiques of weight-loss dieting and Foucauldian work on eating to articulate the self-shaping effects of “ethical vegetarianism.”

  Next, in “Food Choices and Gut Issues,” Jane Dryden draws on work in disability theory and relational autonomy, as well as her interviews with adults who identified as having gut issues, to explore the context in which food choices are made by people with gut issues, in a way that recognizes the interplay between bodily experience and social, relational, and environmental factors.

  Our fourth article is by Maya Hey, who draws on her ethnographic fieldwork in “Attunement and Multispecies Communication in Fermentation” to show that the form of attunement practiced by sake brewers may extend collective ethics to include “microbial others and help rewrite the metaphysics of what it means to be human.”

  On similarly relational themes, Alexis Shotwell writes in “Flourishing Is Mutual: Relational Ontologies, Mutual Aid, and Eating” that food is always relational and never an individualistic matter. Employing Lisa Heldke’s conception of relational ontologies of eating, Shotwell argues that we benefit from taking up an ethical approach to eating that acknowledges the complexity of our consuming relations, addresses the political despair that can arise out of that complexity, and offers guidance for collective responses. 

• Vol. 7 No. 2 (2021)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue. In the first article, "Hope, Solidarity, and Justice," Katie Stockdale argues for a form of collective hope that is born of solidarity and pursuits of justice.

  In our second essay, "Mary Daly’s Philosophy: Some Bergsonian Themes," Stephanie Kapusta draws out similarities between the work of Daly and Henri Bergson, including their distinctions between intuition and intellect, their identifications of two types of 'self,' and identifications of two different ways of experiencing emotion.

  Last, Veronica Ivy critically analyzes and rejects recent arguments against full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport, in the third paper, "If 'Ifs' and 'Buts' Were Candy and Nuts: The Failure of Arguments against Trans and Intersex Women's Full and Equal Inclusion in Women's Sport."

• Vol. 7 No. 1 (2021)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue. First, in "Mansplaining as Epistemic Injustice," Nicole Dular argues that occasions of mansplaining subvert the epistemic roles of hearer (or receiver of knowledge) and speaker (or giver of knowledge)  in a testimonial exchange; mansplaining is then a form of epistemic injustice distinct from testimonial injustice.

  Our second article is Amanda McMullen's "What Am I, a Piece of Meat? Synecdochical Utterances Targeting Women." McMullen argues that the speaker of such utterances prompts the hearer to engage in a certain derogatory pattern of associational thinking, reducing the woman targetted to the bodily part in question, both fragmenting her (reducing her to a part) and biologizing her (characterizing her as mere living tissue).

  Finally, our third article, "How Not to Watch Feminist Pornography" by Richard Kimberly Heck, argues against narrow conceptions of “feminist” pornography; further, following Linda Williams (1989) and elaborating a suggestion made by Nancy Bauer (2015), Heck argues, by example, for the importance of taking pornographic films seriously as films, the better to understand their potential to shape, or misshape, socio-sexual norms. 

• Vol. 6 No. 4 (2020)

  In our final issue of 2020, readers will find five peer-reviewed articles. The first is “Why Luck Egalitarianism Fails in Condemning Oppression,” by Cynthia A. Stark, considering and rejecting luck-egalitarian responses to criticisms that luck egalitarianism condones some cases of oppression and condemns others for the wrong reason.

  The second article, by Rebecca Hannah Smith, is “The Morality of Resisting Oppression,” and advances a view that victims of oppression have pro tanto moral reasons to resist their oppression rather than a full-fledged, absolute moral duty of resistance.

  In the third article, “Mansplaining and Illocutionary Force,” Casey Rebecca Johnson offers a speech-act theoretic account of what goes wrong in cases of what she calls “speech act–confusion mansplaining,” and she argues that they contribute to women’s discursive disablement and to the restriction of women’s participation in epistemically relevant exchanges.

  The fourth article is by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, who argues in “Presupposition and Consent” that “consent” is a concept poorly suited to play its canonical central role in contemporary sexual ethics, and argues that, given the presuppositions implicit in “consent” discourse in the ordinary vernacular, there is good reason to advocate for reform of public discourse on sexual ethics, not merely academic theoretical talk.

  The fifth article in this issue is Ginger Tate Clausen’s “‘Next Time’ Means ‘No’: Sexual Consent and the Structure of Refusals,” in which she urges concerted attention to the structures and contexts of consent and refusal. It is a pleasant coincidence that all of these papers relate to each other so well.

• Vol. 6 No. 3 (2020)

  Readers will find four peer-reviewed articles in this issue. The first is "Field Notes on the Naturalization and Denaturalization of Disability in (Feminist) Philosophy: What They Do and How They Do It," by Shelley Lynn Tremain, arguing "for the importance of critical philosophical work on disability as a means with which to resist and subvert" assumptions about disability and the exclusion of disabled scholars from the profession of philosophy.

  The second article, by Matthew R. McLennan, is "Beauvoir’s Concept of 'Decline'” and trains critical philosophical attention on Simone de Beauvoir’s work on ageing in particular.

  In the third article, "Teaching Ancient Women Philosophers: A Case Study," Sara Protasi addresses the pedagogical challenges of teaching women philosophers in the context of a survey course in ancient Greek philosophy.

  The fourth article is by Derek Anderson, who argues that"Linguistic Hijacking" identifies a form of epistemic and political violence that "involves misusing or co-opting politically significant terminology," with a focus on the words 'racist' and 'racism,' "in ways that harm marginalized groups." 

• Vol. 6 No. 2 (2020)

  Readers will find four peer-reviewed articles in this issue. In “The Mysterious Case of the Missing Perpetrators: How the Privileged Escape Blame and Accountability,” Michelle Ciurria argues that blame and praise are unfairly distributed. She draws on “disappearance narratives” that erase and tacitly exonerate privileged perpetrators, and defends an emancipatory theory of responsibility.

  In “The Epistemic Significance of #MeToo,” Karyn L. Freedman also challenges false and dominant narratives. She argues that #MeToo testimony increases epistemic value for the survivor as a hearer when experiences like hers are represented by others, and for the survivor as a teller when her true story is believed; Freedman elaborates on unappreciated costs to the individual tellers, and the increased credibility they are thereby owed.

  Jana McAuliffe likewise calls for “a reconsideration and reworking of the subject who theorizes,” and urges attention to the legacy of white privilege, especially in American feminist thought, in her article, “Ethical Openness in the Work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.”

  The fourth article is by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who argues for cultivating, rather than discarding, some forms of asymmetrical and gendered emotional labor, in “Stoicism (as Emotional Compression) Is Emotional Labor.” We thank our authors and referees for their contributions to this issue.

• Vol. 6 No. 1 (2020)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue, coincidentally forming a cluster of articles related to labor. The first essay, by Hailey Huget, “Care Workers on Strike,” identifies the moral conflicts of care workers who choose to go on strike; she illuminates the dilemmas confronting those who must reduce their care for students or patients in order to strike for better working conditions, and advances arguments that employers bear responsibility for the conditions that present care workers with such dilemmas. Her article is timely and compelling in light of the difficult choices faced by care workers in a pandemic.

  The second article, by Johanna C. Luttrell, aims to shift our attention from women’s work to women’s assets. In “Women’s Work and Assets: Considering Property Ownership from a Transnational Feminist Perspective,” Luttrell notes that “feminist philosophy lags behind transnational feminist work in other disciplines” in neglecting “the concrete relation between housing, poverty, and empowerment.” Luttrell directs lines of inquiry to asset-ownership and housing from a transnational feminist perspective.

  Our third publication, “Bearing the Brunt of Structural Inequality: Ontological Labor in the Academy,” is coauthored by Ruthanne Crapo Kim, Ann J. Cahill, and Melissa Jacquart. The authors draw attention to “ontological labor,” their term for a form of labor that is required to manage one’s identity and body if either or both do not fit into academic structures, norms, and demands. They advance arguments for its status as a form of labor, its vexed nature as invisible and under-valued, and its perpetuation through systemic inequities in academia.

• Vol. 5 No. 4 (2019)

  Readers will find, in this final issue of our fifth year, two peer-reviewed articles and an acknowledgement of our referees of the first five years of this journal. The first article, by Michael Rea, is "Representational and Attitudinal Sexual Objectification: Philosophical Insights from James Tiptree Jr.’s 'And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.'” Readers interested in the topics of objectification and silencing will find that Rea advances subtle accounts of both as informed by his reflections on the work of science-fiction writer Alice B. Sheldon, the US Air Force intelligence officer, CIA analyst, and experimental psychologist who wrote under the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr.

  The second article, "Uneven Epithets: A Case for an Extension of Shiffrin’s Thinker-Based Approach," by Nicole Ramsoomair, takes on the difficult task of identifying when we might justify regulation of derogatory speech. Ramsoomair draws on aspects of Seana Shiffrin's "thinker-based" approach to free speech protection, but argues that it can protect speech which is ultimately harmful to a thinker's autonomy. Ramsoomair argues that regulation may be warranted if speech offers little to assist autonomous mental development and could potentially undermine that development for others, creating what she calls an asymmetrical burden in the access to discursive resources.

  The third item in this issue is a grateful acknowledgement of the referees who have served so diligently to realize the efforts of our authors and editors in these first five years of the journal. Thanks to all who have assisted us in these early years!

• Vol. 5 No. 3 (2019)

  Readers will find four peer-reviewed articles in this issue. In the first article, “On Finding Yourself in a State of Nature: A Kantian Account of Abortion and Voluntary Motherhood,” Jordan Pascoe defends the right to voluntary motherhood by way of abortion at any stage of pregnancy, on Kantian grounds, as an essential feature of women’s basic rights. Drawing on Kant’s legal philosophy, Pascoe argues that Kant’s understanding of the relationship between the body and the will provides reasons to hold that no conclusive consent to pregnancy is possible, and the fetus’s right to life should be understood as always provisional, rather than enforceable by law.

  In the second essay, “Precarious Embodiment: Unwanted Pregnancy and Bodysubject Interruptus,” D. R. Koukal advances a phenomenological account of embodiment, followed by a rigorous description of pregnant embodiment, with aims including the prioritization of embodiment in abortion debates and the greater understanding of readers, especially men, of the significance of abortion restrictions, through some empathetic understanding of “aversive pregnant subjectivities.”

  In the third article in this issue, “Caregiving and the Abuse of Power,” Joseph Walsh considers criticisms of care ethics that point to imbalances of power between caregiver and cared-for, of concern insofar as they generate a risk that the caregiver’s power will be misused. Walsh argues for the appropriateness of power imbalances to caring relationships, and argues for a greater emphasis on the plurality of values involved in good care; aiming at a balanced approach to caring responsive to the several values of good care, Walsh argues, is an approach that is less likely to lead caregivers to misuse the power which they have over their charges.

  In the fourth article, “Against Abolition,” Matthew J. Cull considers and rejects three types of arguments for gender-abolitionism, and critically considers whether the abolition of gender is really desirable. Cull concludes it is not, and argues that not only are genderless future societies less than feasible, but more importantly, in our current society seeking to abolish gender fails to do justice to trans people’s identifications.

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  Special Issue: In the Unjust Meantime

  Vol. 5 No. 2 (2019)

  This special issue reflecting on the work of Alison Jaggar was proposed and guest-edited by Barrett Emerick and Scott Wisor. This rich collection of nine articles includes six anonymously peer-reviewed articles by Peter Higgins,  Abigail Gosselin, Corwin Aragon, Amandine Catala, Theresa W. Tobin, and Dan Lowe. The three invited articles include the work of Uma Narayan, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Jaggar. The journal thanks the guest-editors, authors, and anonymous referees for their contributions to this absorbing and provocative set of essays. 

• Vol. 5 No. 1 (2019)

  Readers will find three peer-reviewed articles in this issue. The first is “The Construction of a Consumable Body,” by Alison Suen, who proceeds from an analysis of attitudes regarding pregnant women’s bodies to a view of women, more generally, as made responsible for producing a consumable body. Suen argues that the default position of women as consumable is reinforced both by erasing the maternal body and by appealing to the “naturalness” of breastfeeding.

  Suen's arguments are interestingly related to those of Céline Leboeuf, author of our second article, “Anatomy of the Thigh Gap.” Leboeuf argues that women seeking the idealized body in this respect manifest what she calls bodily alienation. She notes that this policing of the body is done in service of an ideal, the individual pursuit of which can constitute self-harm, and she suggests the alternative pursuit of what she calls sensualism, the capacity to enjoy one’s body “not simply by expanding one’s ideals of bodily beauty, but by developing an inner appreciation of the body through physical practices.”

  In our third article, “Feminist Aims and a Trans-Inclusive Definition of ‘Woman,’” Katie L. Kirkland argues against feminist accounts of “woman” that fail to respect trans identities, and establishes “that non-passing trans women are oppressed as women through the internalization of sexual objectification.” Kirkland concludes that an account of “woman” that excludes non-passing trans women cannot successfully advance a complete understanding of women’s oppression.

• Special Issue: Epistemic Injustice and Recognition Theory

  Vol. 4 No. 4 (2018)

  We are pleased to present, as our final issue of 2018, a peer-reviewed special issue on the topic of Epistemic Injustice and Recognition Theory. This collection was guest-edited by Paul Giladi and Nicola McMillan, coeditors of the forthcoming anthology, Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition (Routledge, 2021). Contributions by authors Matthew Congdon, Anna Cook, Michael Doan, Debra L. Jackson, Andrea Lobb, José Medina, and Louise Richardson-Self are followed by an afterword by Miranda Fricker. Giladi and McMillan identify the aim of this collection as the opening of a dialogue between discussions of epistemic injustice and recognition theory, and we believe you will find, as they do, that forms of epistemic injustice are "enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation."

• Vol. 4 No. 3 (2018)

  In this issue, we present five peer-reviewed articles: "Authority and Gender: Flipping the F-Switch" by Lynne Tirrell; "The Institution of Gender-Based Asylum and Epistemic Injustice: A Structural Limit" by Ezgi Sertler; "Eating Identities, 'Unhealthy' Eaters, and Damaged Agency" by Megan Dean; "Values in Good Caring Relations" by Thomas E. Randall; and "Testimonial Smothering and Pornography: Silencing Refusing Sex and Reporting Assault" by Rosa Vince.