In this paper, I analyse the works of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, an Italian mathematician of the eighteenth century. I specifically focus on the themes of proto-feminism, equality, and educational rights as persistent threads of her philosophical and scientific production. I emphasize her continuous efforts to highlight the place of women in the history of philosophy, presenting three chief texts in which these efforts are expressed. In her first work, the Academic oration, in which it is demonstrated that the studies of the liberal arts by the female sex are by no means inappropriate, I show how she articulates a rhetoric defence of women's educational rights. In her second work, the Philosophical propositions, I highlight how she combines Cartesian metaphysics and philosophy of mind to justify women's belonging to the history of philosophy. In analysing her final masterpiece, the Analytical institutions, I interpret the dedication to the Austrian empress Maria Theresa as a proto-feminist text, vindicating the leading role of women in history and society.

Vulnerability is a notion discussed in feminist philosophy as a basis for a morality that widens our sense of those whose deaths are grievable. Vulnerability and grievability also factor in reproductive ethics. This essay employs recognition theory to analyze critically how these notions are mobilized in conservative Christian anti-abortion writings and in feminist philosophy. This analysis exposes weaknesses and misrecognition in both sets of discourses. In response, I offer theological arguments for recognizing fetal value without implying a right to life and for acknowledging how human finitude and the precarity of pregnancy render gestational hospitality a discretionary, not obligatory, moral act.

Previously proposed strategies for tackling hermeneutical injustices take for granted the interests people have in certain things about them being intelligible to them and/or to others, and seek to enable them to satisfy these interests. Strategies of this sort I call interests-as-given strategies. I propose that some hermeneutical injustices can instead be tackled by doing away with certain of these interests, and so with the possibility of their unfair nonsatisfaction. Strategies of this sort I call interests-in-question strategies. As a case study in when such an interests-in-question strategy ought to be pursued, I look at how to tackle hermeneutical injustices arising in the context of gender-affirming healthcare as provided to adults by the National Health Service in the UK. I argue that considerations of trust, privacy, and respect all support pursuing such a strategy. One way to do so, I suggest, would be by replacing the existing gatekeeping model with an informed consent model for the provision of gender-affirming healthcare. Considerations of hermeneutical justice can hence be added to the already-impressive case for undertaking this shift.

While the ethics of care has considered the possibility that caring occurs for the environment, it often remains silent about the caregiving that humans receive from the environment. This essay suggests that ecological justice requires humans to consider themselves not only as ecological caregivers, but also as care receivers from more-than-human earth dwellers. The argument is built by first accounting for the diverse forms of care that humans receive from other-than-humans. The focus then turns to eco-feminist and eco-Marxist thought to denaturalize this care, highlighting how capitalist economies put other-than-humans to work and appropriate their efforts to maintain the world. The fact that they cannot demand a salary and that the commodification of life increases its depletion leads to an examination of how the conceptual recognition of more-than-human care can be translated politically. The article sketches how the political tensions at work in practices and conceptions of care outlined by feminist and indigenous thought could allow to engage more critically with environmental issues, notably by blending environmental humanities’ emphasis on affective dispositions and attachments towards other-than-humans, with materialist ambitions to highlight exploitation and invisible labor.

This paper responds to two trends in debates about Plato's view of women in the Republic. First, many scholars argue or assume that Plato seeks to minimize the influence of femininity in the ideal city, and to make guardian women themselves as “masculine” as possible. Second, scholars who address the relationship between Plato's views of women and his psychological theory tend to focus on the reasoning and appetitive parts of the tripartite soul. In response to the first point, we argue that the idea that Plato seeks to masculinize/de-feminize the city oversimplifies his treatment of Greek gender norms. Although he does want to eliminate some traditionally feminine qualities from the city, he also seeks to eliminate many masculine qualities as well. Moreover, while he tries to make guardian women more like men in some respects, he simultaneously aims to make guardian men more like Greek women in important ways. Regarding the second point, we argue that this project of reimagining gender norms is illuminated by Plato's psychology, but instead of emphasizing reason and appetite, we show how his views are connected to his account of the third, “spirited” part of the soul, thumos, and its dual hard/soft or aggressive/gentle nature.

This paper investigates women's learning experiences in the Confucian tradition and the social dismay and stigma associated with them. Despite being considered a meta-virtue in the Confucian tradition, learning becomes rather complex when women are the learners. It is viewed by learned women as a curse rather than a blessing in pre-modern China; it is associated with the stigma of “leftover women” and “the third sex” in contemporary China. Based on an examination of works written by women thinkers, I argue that the asymmetry in social recognition for men's and women's learning is rooted in the social and family structure of nei (in) and wai (out), which does not assign sufficient cultural and moral significance to learning achieved in the nei domain nor permit its continuous and accumulative existence. I propose two preliminary steps to rectify the issue of the lack of social and moral recognition of women's learning: first, a reforming of the nei and wai structure to allow assigning more moral, cultural, and normative significance to affairs in the nei domain. Second, re-examine and utilize classical Confucian texts such as the Mencius and later works by women writers to support and guide such reformations.

Saba Mahmood's anthropological work studies the gain in skills, agency, and capacity building by the women's dawa movement in Egypt. These women increase their virtue toward the goal of piety by following dominant, often patriarchal norms. Mahmood argues that “teleological feminism” ignores this gain in agency because this kind of feminism only focuses on opposition or resistance to these norms. In this paper I defend Mahmood's “anti-teleological” feminist work from criticisms that her project valorizes oppression and has no vision for a nonoppressive feminist future. I argue the future envisioned by teleological feminists gets caught in “the Hegelian” trap of replicating past oppression in their feminist future. I find in Mahmood's work the tools to escape this trap. I argue, rather than a movement of overcoming oppression, Mahmood's work suggests an immanent and creative movement that emphasizes difference for a truly new future. I turn to a Bergsonian metaphor and argue that this movement can be seen as akin to the movement of biological evolution. I conclude using the work of Eve Sedgwick that the Egyptian women that Mahmood studies are being read in a “paranoid” fashion and demonstrate using Leila Ahmed a better “reparative” reading of these women.

While the concept of interspecies solidarity has been central to ecofeminist work on animal rights since the 1980s, less attention has been devoted to the question of animal desire within the feminist animal care tradition, the majority of which has focused on women's and animals’ shared oppression under patriarchy. This article offers a reformulation of feminist animal care ethics, one that seeks to recenter animal desire as the ground for interspecies solidarity. The first section of the article offers a review of the relationship between women and interspecies solidarity as articulated within the feminist animal care tradition. Part two draws upon multispecies ethnographic participant observation at a cat sanctuary in Syros, Greece, to account for questions of animal agency, as well as the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of interspecies care work. The final section of the article concludes by considering the ways in which grief and mourning are central to the decolonial project of feminist interspecies care and solidarity in a post-pandemic world.

Contemplating how the familiar trope of the “bad Black mother” is used to surveil, punish, and scorn Black maternal subjects this article considers how good motherhood is at once aspirational and coercive for Black mothers who are disciplined by the ever looming threat of badness and the unattainable promise of goodness. Stretching contemporary Black feminist analyses of how Black maternal revolt against anti-Black logics can be witnessed through forms of mortal sacrifice that secure future Black life, this article troubles ideals of sacrifice through an auto-ethnographic reading of maternal death as a respite from the continuous labors of goodness for the subject that tires under the relentless force of racism and its anticipations of bad Black motherhood. Badness is then explored, through personal narrative, as a form of affective resistance against the drudgery of willing towards goodness as the maternal refuses to discipline their discontent.

This paper considers the use of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “becoming-woman” for feminist theory. Since its first use, the concept has polarized feminist theory. For some, it presents the route out of masculinist logics that third-wave feminism has sought; for others, it denies the female experience and returns “woman” to universalizing, implicitly masculine presuppositions. The paper argues that both are partly right, and that the disagreement stems from an underdeveloped consideration of how “being” and “becoming” coexist in time. Following Rosi Braidotti, the paper claims that “woman” must be understood not in essentialist terms, but as the “virtual feminine” who is the contested subject of sexual difference. Seen this way, woman's being is inseparable from her becoming. The paper therefore argues that we must understand the mutually constitutive relation of being and becoming that produces “woman” in this sense. Drawing on Deleuze's discussion of Aion and Chronos, the paper sees the subject of feminism as temporally dislocated, with both a being and a becoming, rooted in a present that she is always moving beyond. But it claims that this is central for reconciling the conflicting understandings of becoming-woman, and so for preserving the concept as a feminist tool.

This article focuses on the role of servants in María Lugones’ “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” I show that Lugones uses and erases the work of servants in developing her understanding of world-traveling. This theoretical marginalization and instrumentalization challenges her claim to capture concrete, lived experience. This article argues that Lugones’ theory is “pseudo-concrete”: it capitulates into the very abstractions it seeks to overcome. Focusing on the role of servants reveals the class character of world-traveling and, in turn, its inability to grasp class relations. This article, thus, invites decolonial feminists to reconsider the advantages of class analysis for understanding not only capitalist domination but also perception, identification, and love.

Biological types, including holotypes and reference genomes, are particular biological entities that represent an entire class of biological entities. This paper presents a feminist analysis of biological typing by asking whether we have reason to criticize the practices of selecting holotypes and reference genomes for being androcentric. I offer three distinct reasons why androcentrism can be objectionable: androcentric practices may inadequately account for traits or experiences of women/females, reinforce male/female dichotomies, or overgeneralize from particulars. I then evaluate whether the practices of selecting holotypes and genomes are objectionably androcentric in these three ways. These typing practices, especially as applied to the case of humans, are objectionably androcentric in some ways but not others. Whether a typing practice problematically ignores the traits or experiences of women depends on whether the typing practice involves non-accidentally taking the traits or experiences of male humans as typical, which, I argue, is true both in the case of holotypes and genomes. Neither holotypes nor genomes reinforce male/female dichotomies, although some features of these practices may appear to do so. Finally, both holotypes and genomes are criticizable for overgeneralizing from particulars, although this criticism does not depend on these practices being androcentric.

“Multidimensional” accounts of autonomy offer multiple, rather than unitary, dimensions along which to measure autonomy. Such accounts are significant developments in the literature and help generate nuanced, degree-based frameworks. However, transnational feminists—those theorizing feminism in light of (post)colonialism and global neoliberalism—may raise concerns about multidimensional accounts for women in the Global South. For instance, there may be worries about the generalized focus and implicit individualism that still lurks. Sympathetic to both non-unitary autonomy and transnational feminist projects, I argue that multidimensional accounts can be salvaged from such critiques with two amendments. First, they can adopt what I label a “critical” relational framing, and second, they can include intersectional identities. Using commercial surrogates in India as an example, I show how these amendments to multidimensional theories might better serve these women of color, and indeed all persons.

This essay theorizes a problem for feminism posed by a particular form of trauma discourse. Feminists have played an important role in developing cultural and clinical conceptions of trauma, but one result of the destigmatization of trauma has been that trauma discourse is sometimes used as a form of cultural capital to reinforce existing hierarchies. In a novel application of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of distinction, we show how, when instrumentalized as cultural capital, trauma discourse can be used to reinforce patriarchy and other systems of oppression. We trace a critical feminist history of the struggle to understand and treat trauma. Using examples from contemporary US popular culture, we illustrate the appropriation of trauma discourse to entrench existing structures of gender, class, and racial oppression. First, the misuse of trauma discourse as cultural capital can encourage the instrumental use of trauma claims for cultural power, ultimately reinforcing patriarchy. Second, it might erode the legitimacy of trauma, a conceptual tool pioneered by feminists and still essential to their political claims. This discussion has important implications for not only mental health practitioners and trauma survivors but also feminist theorists, trauma studies scholars, and those interested in deconstructing structural injustice and relations of inequality.

This paper aims to extend the discussion of silencing beyond the realm of speech and to the domain of conversational silences—that is, silences that have communicative functions in our conversational exchanges. I argue that, insofar as we can use silences to communicate, we can also be prevented from doing things with these silences. Alongside a threefold taxonomy I show the different ways in which this can happen, utilizing and extending Maitra's (2009) account of silencing to illustrate the wrong happening in these cases. This discussion not only highlights a new domain of silencing that has, so far, been underexplored, but also uncovers just how deep linguistic injustices can run.