Although the idea that sexual violence is a “structural” problem is not new, the lack of specification as to what that entails blocks effective responses to it. This paper illustrates the concept of sexual violence as structural in the sense of containing a type of moral wrong called “structural wrong” and discusses its practical implications. First, I introduce a distinction between two types of moral wrongs—interactional wrongs and structural wrongs—and I argue that the moral problem of sexual violence includes both types, each of which calls for a different set of moral responses. Second, drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model of responsibility, I argue that recognizing the structural-wrong element of sexual violence does not reduce individual perpetrators’ responsibility for it. Instead, it implies that a broader group of agents are required to join collective actions to reform the social structure. I conclude by evaluating some preventive programs against sexual violence through the lens of structural wrongs and providing directions to advance them.

Mary Astell's female retreat is a political project, dedicated to the full self-realization of students in a world that diminishes them and thwarts the development of their potential. Newly analyzing the pedagogical tools and distinctive setting of her seminary, I reveal its most progressive promise. In this political reading of A Serious Proposal, Astell emerges as an early figure in the broad political tradition of female resistance to patriarchal domination. She enables a subordinated group of women to arrive at new and oppositional ways of understanding themselves, each other, and even the world, and to act for change. The methods and tactics she employs in her retreat bring to light some surprisingly democratic and feminist dimensions of Mary Astell.

Some ecofeminist scholars have argued that being a feminist entails being a contextual vegan. Donna Haraway has opposed this position and received extensive critique. Yet no one, to my knowledge, has systematically studied how Haraway's theory can enrich ecofeminist vegan literature. To this end, I first establish the method of analysis, and/or framework, I use to read Haraway's work, what I call, interconstitutionality. Next, I delineate the limitations of Haraway's thinking insofar as it assumes a position of human dominion over animals. I then explore some aspects of Haraway's theory that can enrich ecofeminist vegan scholarship and provide insights to go beyond the limits of Haraway's corpus regarding: (1) the entanglements and embodied vulnerabilities that constitute human and non-human animals; (2) the agency of animals and the importance of curiosity and respect in leading just lives with other than human animals; (3) the ethical relevance of otherness, difference, and vulnerability at multiple scales: subject, community/herd, species, and cross-species (e.g., there are shared vulnerabilities between beings who are pregnant regardless of the species they belong to); and (4) the unavoidable violence that human existence entails. The text closes by affirming an ecofeminist non-anthropocentric vegan ontology and ethico-politics that aspires to overcome human dominion over animals.

In pornography, standard modeling contracts often require a performer to surrender rights over their public image and sexual media in perpetuity and across media. Under these contracts, performers are unable to determine who accesses, for what duration, and under what conditions, their sexual media. As a result, pornography has been described by some performers as a “life sentence”—a phrase which, if true, violates some strong intuitions we share about the importance of autonomy in sexual activity. Using the framework of “affirmative consent,” I argue that these contracts violate performers’ rights to sexual autonomy, and ought therefore to be considered objectionable. Overall, I argue that the legal regimes we create have a strong impact on people's lives, and more important than legislating individual outcomes, the type of infrastructure we build around people's decisions has the potential to radically empower—or disempower—those engaged in sex work.

Martha Nussbaum in her The New Religious Intolerance (2012) commits several old forms of epistemic vice including exclusion, orientalism, and colonial discourse. Unsurprisingly, as a result, her text contributes to the production of ignorance about Muslims and Muslim women despite her intention of combating Islamophobia. In this article, I specifically critique Nussbaum's anti-burqa-ban arguments and her pro-airport-profiling stance. To do so, I draw on the work of Audre Lorde and other feminist scholars and scholars of color to express the harms of excluding Muslim voices and misusing Western/white voices in their place. Recalling Edward Said, Marilyn Frye, and María Lugones, I argue that Nussbaum's text is a classic example of orientalism and various forms of colonial discourse.

J. L. Austin argues that ordinary language should be used to identify when it is appropriate or inappropriate to make, accept, or reject knowledge claims. I criticize Austin's account. In our ordinary life, we often accept justifications rooted in racism, sexism, ableism, and classism as reasons to dismiss knowledge claims or challenges, despite the fact such reasons are not good reasons. Austin's Ordinary Language Epistemology (OLE) inadvertently classifies the discounting of knowledge claims in classic cases of epistemic injustice as legitimate ordinary maneuvers. I provide recommendations for revision of OLE and offer a means of distinguishing between dismissals in cases of epistemic injustice and their legitimate counterparts.

A central function of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States has been to center and express the lived experiences of Black people within the social and political framework of white supremacy. Regarding reproductive justice, BLM, as well as organizations like the Black Mamas Matter Alliance and Sistersong, have drawn political attention to the oppressive parameters existing for pregnant people “birthing while Black.” Attention to disparities in health and birth outcomes for Black persons has necessary positive effects, such as the ability to produce data on the deleterious effects of anti-Blackness. However, discourses surrounding Black birthing persons can function to obfuscate the collective action undertaken by Black women and non-Black women of color. In this paper, I argue the hyper-focus on the problems Black pregnant/birthing persons face has at least four issues: (1) it encourages an ontological collapse wherein Black birthers are positioned as problems, rather than human beings facing problems; (2) obscures the collective action and care Black women undertake to support one another; (3) results in state solutions that rely on underpaid and volunteer labor of Black and non-Black women of color; and (4) focuses myopically on the time period of pregnancy and birthing for Black persons.

An apparent antagonism exists between fundamentality-focused mainstream metaphysics such as naturalized metaphysics—a metaphysics inspired and constrained by the findings of our best science—and feminist metaphysics whose subject matter is typically non-fundamental social reality. Taking Karen Barad's agential realism as a case study, this paper argues that these may not be in conflict after all. Agential realism is a metaphysical framework founded on quantum mechanics which shares the characteristic features of naturalized metaphysics. But Barad finds warrant to extend the scope of agential realism all the way to theorizing about our lifeworld as exemplified by her profound influence on feminist new materialism. Thus, this case study indicates that there does not have to be a division between fundamental and feminist metaphysics. The broad intended scope of agential realism is challenged by the success of Newtonian mechanics as an approximation of quantum mechanics, but certain aspects of agential realism promise to be robust under such approximation. If this is so, then Barad provides us with a metaphysics that is naturalized, fundamental, and feminist all at once.

During the first decades of the twentieth century when the Indian freedom struggle movement gained momentum, M. K. Gandhi often evoked Mirabai—the sixteenth-century bhakti poet-saint—in his public speeches and voluminous letters. This article demonstrates the degree to which Gandhi's maneuver fundamentally altered Mirabai's image as a national and cultural symbol, and how it prompted the mobilization of women in the larger nationalist movement. Through the process of appropriation, Mirabai's image evolved in the Indian cultural realm from a woman charged with promiscuity into an ideal “chaste” woman. Gandhi's intervention further initiated a moral renaissance parallel to the nationalist current where women transgressed the thresholds of traditional domesticity and became active agents of non-violent resistance—Hindu/spiritual in essence—inspired by Mirabai's suffering and compositions. Gandhi's Mira emerged as a literary-cultural hybrid that circulated in public spheres, as Mirabai became a public icon and a vehicle for women's emancipation alongside national liberation.

According to speech-act theory, we do things with words every time we speak. The most striking thing one can do with words is to exercise authority over others, such as when a judge issues a guilty verdict in a criminal trial. Some speakers hold this kind of authority without good reason; this kind of speech constitutes an unjust imposition of authority, and thus arguably harms in a direct, non-metaphorical sense; it would seem, therefore, that it should not be protected by freedom of speech. The problem in these cases, however, does not lie in the words that harmful speakers utter, but in the things they have the power to do with them. It is this power, it seems, that must be dismantled: in speech-act terms, we must tackle felicity conditions, not locutions. This paper defends this insight. By providing an account of the (alleged) authority of pornographers as both epistemic and informal, I claim that the presumption against censoring porn is not lifted even if the speech-act argument succeeds in showing that pornography can be constitutive of harm. This does not mean that such harms should not be countered, but they should be countered as the specific kinds of harms that they are.

The relation between time and gender has been extensively discussed in feminist theory, from Simone de Beauvoir to recent studies of queer temporality and crip time. In this article, I explore gender as “lived time” in relation to a pressing feminist issue: social recognition of the chronic illness endometriosis (endo). Based on my interviews with individuals diagnosed with endo, I argue that lived time can be studied by approaching becoming as a dynamic process or flow of recognition, creating certain temporal patterns in the lifeworld. I propose the concept of “endo time” as a phenomenological conception of the lived time of endo. I identify three temporal patterns that characterize endo time: waiting time (I), cyclical or chronic time (II), and sedimented time (III). The analysis contributes to feminist philosophy by detailing how gender appears as a specific orchestration of time. Because of its connection to feminized pain and menstrual flow on the one hand and social recognition on the other, endo presents an illuminating case for exploring the relation between gender, recognition, and lived time.

The stakes of feminist activism, and the fault lines within feminism, have a newfound significance in this cultural moment. In response to the fall of Roe, the ascendancy of incendiary far-right politics, and the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologies, grassroots feminist activism and its impacts have never mattered more. When reading Rachel Seidman's Speaking of Feminism and Arielle Rotramel's Pushing Back, both books that feature interviews and ethnographic work on feminists and feminist groups prior to the 2016 election (Seidman interviewed participants from 2014 to 2016, and Rotramel worked on this material primarily from 2007 to 2011), the gap between the pre- and post-2016 realities seems ever more stark. These books highlight feminisms just prior to the series of aggressive assaults that feminism (and all forms of social justice) would face following the 2016 US presidential election. Both serve as a kind of warning—feminists of all ages understood the hazards of fusing misogyny and white supremacy—and as capturing the histories of feminist activism before the cascade of traumas that would ensue from 2016 to the present day. In this way, feminist ethnographic work and interviews with activists operate as time capsules with unique relevance to the genealogical structure of feminist history and activism. By foregrounding women-of-color-led activisms in particular, historians can trace in this period the movement from theorizing about intersectionality to enacting feminist activisms that draw from experiences of marginalization. The significance of feminist work that built on, and contributed to, theorizing about intersecting identities and interlocking oppressions is brought boldly to life in these two texts.