Search

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women's attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent hatred. I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger's autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger's racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement.

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender.Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means.The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted.

This research article aims to theoretically reconstruct a positive feminist conceptualization of vulnerability via a thorough systematization and critical comparison of Martha Fineman’s socio-legal philosophy and Judith Butler’s post-structuralist ethico-political theory. Through the introduction, the reader becomes familiar with numerous interdisciplinary re-articulations of vulnerability within the realms of contemporary feminist theory. The second subsection illustrates Fineman’s vulnerability approach in terms of an alternative ontological paradigm deriving from the recognition of our fundamentally fragile universal condition. It explores Fineman vulnerability theory’s normative implications in relation to the legitimate political organization of democratic societies and the fair function of their central institutions. The third subsection systematizes the dual texture of the Butlerian radicalization of vulnerability as an existential condition of irreducible relationality and a socio-historically contextualized and differentially allocated distribution of precarity among differently gendered, racialized, sexualized and nationalized subjects. Incidentally, the article elucidates the differentiations between the Butlerian conceptions of vulnerability, precariousness, precarity and dispossession and additionally investigates Butler’s revolutionary constellation of vulnerability and resistance. In the third subsection, this article designates the similarities and divergences between the two vulnerability frameworks and critically evaluates their epistemological capacity to reconstitute a politically empowering conceptualization of vulnerability within the heart of contemporary feminist theory. To that end, the author develops a critical assessment of Fineman theory’s epistemological, political and conceptual limitations in regard of its gender-blind universalistic structure. The author conclusively argues that Butler’s two-fold vulnerability perspective entails more nuanced theoretical conceptions and more empowering political devices for contemporary feminist struggles.

An important question confronting feminist philosophers is why women are sometimes complicit in their own subordination. The dominant view holds that complicity is best understood in terms of adaptive preferences. This view assumes that agents will naturally gravitate away from subordination and towards flourishing as long as they do not have things imposed on them that disrupt this trajectory. However, there is reason to believe that ‘impositions’ do not explain all of the ways in which complicity can arise. This paper defends a phenomenological account of complicity, which offers an alternative explanation.

I argue that sound-centric scholarship can be of use to feminist theorists if and only if it begins from a non-ideal theory of sound; this article develops such a theory. To do this, I first develop more fully my claim that perceptual coding was a good metaphor for the ways that neoliberal market logics (re)produce relations of domination and subordination, such as white supremacist patriarchy. Because it was developed to facilitate the enclosure of the audio bandwidth, perceptual coding is especially helpful in centring the ways that patriarchal racial capitalism structures our concepts and experiences of both sound and technology. The first section identifies sonic cyberfeminist practices that function as a kind of perceptual coding because they subject ‘sound’ and/or ‘women’ to enclosure and accumulation by dispossession. The second section identifies a type of sonic cyberfeminism that tunes into the parts of the spectrum that this perceptual coding discards, building models of community and aesthetic value that do not rely on the exclusion of women, especially black women, from both humanist and posthuman concepts of personhood. Here I focus especially on Alexander Weheliye’s ‘phonographic’ approach to sound, technology and theoretical text. This approach, which he develops in his 2005 book of that title and in recent work in collaboration with Katherine McKittrick, avoids fetishising tech and self-transformation and focuses on practices that build registers of existence that hegemonic institutions perceptually code out of circulation. I conclude with examples of such phonographic compression, including Masters At Work’s ballroom classic ‘The Ha Dance’ and Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’.

The received view is that Yunjidang’s feminist philosophy focuses on female sagehood, drawing on the theory of the equal human nature of women and men. I argue that there is much more to it than th...

Aging transcends and intersects all structured social differences as a fluid complex of positionalities: a temporal situatedness in relation to gender, class, race, and sexuality. Age's operation as an organizing principle of power remains undertheorized in feminist philosophy. This article employs a geographical lens to spatialize feminist thought on old age to enrich understanding of factors underpinning expectations and practices of what particular bodies can and should do in particular spaces. Vignettes from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with six older individuals in a midwestern American city demonstrate the utility of advancing not just an embodied feminist philosophy of aging, but one that is emplaced to deepen understanding of the body as situated in time and space. A person's situatedness in dynamic place-events, ranging from daily life at home and engagement in supportive social spaces to experiences of discrimination and even inclement weather, produce distinct ways of being old. Investigating intimate geographies of later life from the micro to macro scale can help destabilize and challenge the objectification, control, and Othering of old people, the majority of whom are female. This article contributes greater “body a-where-ness” to feminist philosophy and stimulates novel investigation into the spatiotemporal situatedness of later life.

To the fe/male author, to write is to feel, to think, to touch, to sense, to learn, to experience, to relate, and to perform the body in the text with the fingers.

I discuss the issues raised by Alcoff, Arya, and Taiwo in their responses to Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. I pay special attention to a fact I think all nonideal theori...

Analytic philosophy has transgender trouble. In this article, the author explores potential explanations for this trouble, focusing on the notion of “cisgender commonsense” and its place in philosophical methodology.

Alex Byrne’s article, “Are Women Adult Human Females?”, asks a question that Byrne treats as nearly rhetorical. Byrne’s answer is, ‘clearly, yes’. Moreover, Byrne claims, woman is a biological category that does not admit of any interpretation as (also) a social category. It is important to respond to Byrne’s argument, but mostly because Byrne’s argument is a paradigmatic instance of a wider phenomenon. The slogan “women are adult human females” is a political slogan championed by anti-trans activists, appearing on billboards, pamphlets, and anti-trans online forums. In this paper, I respond to Byrne’s argument, revealing significant problems with its background assumptions, content, and methodology.

Amb la seva "raó poètica", María Zambrano va aconseguir trobar, a mesura que buscava, un mètode possible del descobriment de l’ésser enfront de si mateix, a partir d’un pensament que permet la màxima amplitud, des de la mínima violència. Ontologia adequada, que per ser-ho s’ofereix com a model teòric possible no sols a l’estat fragmentari de les humanitats, sinó, per això mateix, a la teoria feminista., With her "poetic reason", María Zambrano managed to find, in the process of searching, a possible method of self-discovery, of the self facing itself, based on a form of thought that allows for the maximum possible amplitude, with the minimum possible violence. Zambrano’s ontology is suitable as a possible theoretical model to explore the fragmented state of both the Humanities in general and feminist theory., Con su "razón poética", María Zambrano logró hallar, a medida que buscaba, un método posible del descubrimiento del ser ante sí mismo, a partir de un pensamiento que permite la máxima amplitud, desde la mínima violencia. Ontología adecuada, que por serlo se ofrece como modelo teórico posible no solo al estado fragmentario de las Humanidades, sino, y por ello mismo, a la teoría feminista.

This Master Thesis focuses on the theoretical reconstruction of a positive feminist conceptualization of vulnerability via the thorough systematization and critical comparison of Martha Fineman’s socio-legal philosophy and Judith Butler’s poststructuralist ethico-political theory. In the introductory remarks, the reader becomes familiar with the turbulent receptions and numerous interdisciplinary re-artications of the term vulnerability within the realms of contemporary feminist theory. The second chapter mainly illustrates the core thematic axes of Fineman’s vulnerability approach. More specifically, the second chapter explores Fineman’s vulnerability perspective both in terms of an alternative ontological paradigm revolving around the recognition of our fundamentally vulnerable, shared, fragile and dependent universal condition, as well as in relation to its juridico-political normative implications apropos of the legitimate political organization of democratic societies and the just function of their central institutions. Furthermore, the third chapter systematizes the dual texture of the Butlerian radicalization of vulnerability in terms of both an existential condition of irreducible relationality, as well as in terms of a socio-politically contextualized and differentially allocated distribution of violence, deprivation, insecurity, injury and trauma to certain -gendered, racialized, sexualized and nationalized- social categories. To that end, the third chapter further elucidates the nuanced differentiations between the Butlerian conceptions of vulnerability, precariousness, precarity and dispossession, while further investigating Butler’s revolutionary constellation of vulnerability and resistance. Conclusively, this Master Thesis critically designates the similarities and divergences between the two above analysed feminist frameworks and supports that the twofold texture of the Butlerian vulnerability theory invests Butler’s ethico-political theory with more nuanced theoretical conceptions and more empowering political devices in comparison to Fineman’s universalistic postidentitarian vulnerability approach. In order to further enhance this core argument, I develop my own critical assessment of Fineman theory’s epistemological, political and conceptual limitations in regard of its self-declared ‘post-identitarian’ structure.

Many contemporary feminists Challenge the popular notion that there is an integral relationship, which is assumed, between women and peace. This article briefly summarizes the contributions of feminist theorizing to peace studies and research in the United States. It informs readers as to the feminist debate and resulting tensions within the fields as to the very nature of women. Most feminist peace researchers and educators today seek a finely tuned appreciation of a variety of approaches to the study of gender and of their human differences and commonalties. Understanding of the historical and social specificity of peacemaking and reconsideration of the role of human agency are now reflected in the work of contemporary feminist peace researchers.

One of the most pressing and urgent academic tasks of the day is to dismantle the persistent Eurocentrism of philosophy. In the quest to remedy the white, middle-class, heteronormative, and European biases of philosophy's initial expressions, feminist theorizing has cultivated culturally and ethnically specific forms, intersectional analyses, and global articulations. Buddhism beyond Gender and Women and Buddhist Philosophy breathe new vitality into these pursuits. Both books underscore the immense potential of the core doctrines of Buddhist philosophy, such as the nonsubstantialist view of self, the nondualistic outlook, and the ontological premise of the interdependence of all beings (pratītyasamutpāda), for overcoming Western hierarchies, reified conceptions of identity, and pernicious dichotomies. The two women represented in these books—Rita Gross herself (1943–2015) and Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun (1896–1971)—ground philosophy in a narrative, existential journey and in their personal practices as Buddhists. In contrast with Gross's second-wave methodology and revisionist aims, Park's contribution to comparative feminist scholarship underscores the originality of Iryŏp's attempt to rethink Buddhist ideas in a contemporary feminist context. Particularly compelling is that Park unequivocally defends existential narrative as a genre of philosophy largely through an analysis of the Buddhist nun's love letters.

This essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between (older) white women and (younger) Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring.

“The Subaltern Clinic” considers Frantz Fanon’s political writings alongside his clinical work, most of which he conducted at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria between 1953 and 1956. The essay considers the political and clinical aspects of Fanon’s work to show how, in his writings, the clinic emerges as a subaltern space, where questions of violence, war, colonial madness, and postcolonial trauma are central.

The relation between Australia’s First Nations peoples and settler-colonial Australians may be characterised as having “miscarried” to the extent that colonial difference is unacknowledged, and Aboriginal peoples are expected to assimilate to white Australian culture. This paper brings Luce Irigaray’s feminist thought into dialogue with Indigenous philosophy and activism to think through this “relation” – or absence of relation. For Irigaray the miscarriage of relationality takes place between women and men when the sexual relation is mischaracterised as procreation, and thus reified as the concrete “child,” rather than conceived as a living, changing “interval” that is shared and maintained by each. Likewise, while coloniser Australians have – via appropriation of Aboriginal children – reduced the relation with Aboriginal peoples to one of absorption or assimilation, First Nations political action offers something akin to Irigaray’s “interval”: a third term co-produced by two different parties, t...

This chapter discusses the meaning, possibility, and contributions of Black feminist philosophy. The chapter discusses a politics of refusal that characterizes Black women’s theorizing and develops it as a framework for understanding how Black feminist philosophy is more than mere corrective and subversion of mainstream philosophy. As a framework, Black feminist philosophical “politics of refusal” depicts how Black feminist philosophers doing philosophy for Black women and girls refuse to sell themselves short, refuse institutionally imposed intellectual trajectories, and refuse to respond to philosophy’s call to order in their attempts to lay down uncompromisingly Black feminist research agendas in philosophy. The chapter offers an overview of important contributions to the field and discusses how a politics of refusal operates as critique and knowledge production within the field.

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical engagements with critical race theory, reflection on examples of important contributions to this discussion, and current and future directions in feminist critical race theory. In particular, it focuses on feminist philosophy’s engagement with intersectionality as the most productive site of the field’s engagement with critical race theory. The chapter discusses the meaning of intersectionality and the importance of understanding the concept not only in terms of the field of critical race theory but also as a philosophical contribution of the Black feminist intellectual tradition. The chapter explores how Black feminist philosophers and other feminist philosophers of color have resisted the move towards operational intersectionality and opened productive, liberatory ways forward for intersectional work within feminist philosophy as a critical practice rooted in the lived experiences of women of color.

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical work on human rights, including examples of important contributions to this discussion, as well as current and future directions. Major feminist theories of the grounding of human rights are presented together with feminist critiques of human rights as a basis for feminist practice. Genocidal rape and the right to bodily integrity, the right to care and the care drain from the Global South to the Global North, and the feminization of poverty in the context of global justice are discussed in detail. Issues concerning women’s agency within diverse cultural contexts punctuate these discussions.

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in Latina/x feminist philosophy, as well as reflection on important contributions and future directions to the field and Themes discussed in the chapter include identity and the self, embodiment, ambivalence, multiplicity, and the relationship between Latin American and US Latinx philosophies. The chapter explains that much of the work among Latina/x feminist scholars strives to analyze the complicated dynamics among communities of color, including coalitional work among Black, Indigenous, Asian, Arab, and Latin American women.

Breast cancer is a major public health issue and it can impact individual’s lives in different dimensions. Although women are the ones most affected by this illness, there are other minority groups, such as men and transgender people, that are also affected and frequently ignored in healthcare approaches. People affected by breast cancer can face societal oppressions that puts them into a vulnerable situation where they need to deal with the suffering involved in have a serious illness and the societal expectations of the body. This situation can negatively influence an individual’s sense of identity and views of the body. As a result, it becomes necessary to dismantle the monolithic constructions on this collective, since these groups not only carry their gender identity but also the identities forged by social and cultural experiences. Thus, this article is a philosophical reflection to critically examine conceptual understandings of the body for individuals affected by breast cancer, to understand the influence of social interactions in this process based on the feminist philosophy, and to explore how nurses and healthcare professionals can help tackling this issue. Feminist thinking has become a crucial component of both political and sanitary philosophy and theory, and it is promoting a real "refoundation" of the political, philosophical, and theoretical dimensions. Therefore, it is important to healthcare professionals to use a philosophical feminist approach to breast cancer to help empowering these individuals and disassemble the constructions on this collective.

Shelley L. Tremain’s Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (2017) builds on the author’s over twenty years of professional labour and scholarly interventions within philosophy to provide a compelling and careful examination of a range of timely issues for researchers and students in disability studies.

[Extract] This chapter focuses on the 'doing' aspect of feminist practice in an Australian political and organisational environment, which I argue is steeped in the neoliberal agenda. The chapter discusses some key constraints and practical responses to feminist social work practice in terms of the sector that deals with domestic violence and sexual assault in the current climate of neoliberalism and managerialism. Through a critical reflective process, it is acknowledged that the culture, structure and policy frameworks articulated by neoliberal and managerialist positions have impacted on feminist practices. These impacts are often simply perceived as a negative; yet it is proposed here that tensions created in the current context may also provide an opportunity for subversive feminist practices with key organisations to further feminist agendas and social change. Although located in a specific sector, it is suggested that the experiences reflected upon here, and the practice responses discussed, are transferable. Through reflection on practice, five key areas impacted by the neoliberal and managerialist agenda were identified: stifling of activism, collaboration and partnership, keeping gender on the agenda, management and education and training. Although these five key areas have been identified, these are all components of the larger threat of the current environment-that being attempts to dismantle feminist practices. This chapter speaks to the practical application of feminist social work in each of the identified areas with the overarching focus of practice being to maintain the feminist gains that have been made to 'hold the line' and to advance feminist practices in a hostile political environment.

© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016. Cultural criminology emerged in the mid-nineties with defining texts written by Jock Young, Keith Hayward, and Jeff Ferrell, among others. Since its inception, it has been criticized for its shallow connections with feminist theory. While in theory cultural criminology clearly acknowledges the influence of feminist scholarship, it has in practice often only superficially ‘added’ on gender and sexuality to its scholarly investigations. Yet, as we argue, research identified with cultural criminology has much to gain from feminist theory. This article reviews a range of cultural criminological scholarship, particularly studies of subcultures, edgework, and terrorism. We investigate three themes significant for feminist research: masculinities and femininities, sexual attraction and sexualities, and intersectionality. Such themes, if better incorporated, would strengthen cultural criminology by increasing the explanatory power of resulting analyses. We conclude by advocating that feminist ideas be routinely integrated into cultural criminological research.

Contemporary feminist philosophy classically tends to reject ideas of historical and biological progress as patriarchal and/or capitalist constructs of temporality. Lately, however, the new materialism in feminism attempts to ‘recover’ the writings of Charles Darwin and evolutionary science, constructing a non-teleological and anti-essentialist feminist theory of mutability, transversality and trans-species connection. Referring to the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Rick Dolphijn, Iris van der Tuin and Jane Bennett, this article critically analyses the new materialists’ reading of some key elements in evolutionary theory and the ‘newness’ of new materialism itself, in an attempt to explore the broader philosophical bases for their claims, and the theory of ‘life’ that appears as a consequence.

Scholars of Latin American literature have long studied the topic of motherhood, but the paucity of literary representations of pregnancy itself has resulted in a tradition of what we might call postpartum criticism. Moreover, in most of this critical work, pronatalism (a hegemonic belief that human reproduction is always desirable) remains largely unquestioned. In this study of the antinatalist views in two works by awardwinning Chilean author Lina Meruane—Contra los hijos (2014) and Fruta podrida (2007)—I show how Meruane joins a growing cohort of writers who object to "choice feminism," a popular feminist philosophy that validates all women's choices on the basis of liberated individualism. Meruane's provocative representations of women who choose to procreate displace the sentimentality of childrearing and foreground the economic stakes of childbearing. This shift requires readers to consider the praxis of gestation, its value, and the corporal cost of production borne, always, by mothers.

This essay is a response to the events surrounding Hypatia's publication of “In Defense of Transracialism.” It does not take up the question of “transracialism” itself, but rather attempts to shed light both on what some black women may have experienced following from the publication of the article and on how we might understand this experience as harm. It also suggests one way for feminist journals to reduce the likelihood of similar harms occurring in the future. I begin by describing a discussion that occurred in my classroom that bears some resemblance to the much larger debate that emerged around Hypatia. Next, I elaborate a concept of imperial harm. I then address how this concept comes to be relevant to the experience of black women within the discipline of philosophy in general, before briefly describing how academic feminism (including feminist philosophy) has served as a particular site of imperial harm for black women. Finally, touching on the idea of expressive harm, I conclude with an appeal for the adoption of more feminist publication ethics.

Bruno Latour is not the only scholar to reflect on his earlier contributions to science studies with some regret and resolve over climate skepticism and science denialism. Given the ascendency of merchants of doubt, should those who share Latour's concerns join the scientists they study in circling the wagons, or is there a productive role still for science studies to question and critique scientists and scientific institutions? I argue for the latter, looking to postpositivist feminist philosophy as exemplified by Alison Wylie and Lynn Nelson, among others, as a guide. Feminist philosophers of science who ground their analysis in a detailed understanding of scientific practice are not science's champions nor its antagonists, but they do stand in a distinct relationship to science. If not merchants of doubt, are they scientific gadflies or perhaps in scientific loyal opposition? Though these notions can underwrite useful approaches to science studies, neither captures the distinctive interdependency and interestedness of feminist philosophers and science. I suggest that we would be better served by the notion of trustworthy science criticism, building on the analyses of trust and trustworthiness by Annette Baier, among others, attendant to the dynamics of interdependency in trust relationships.

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) was an influential though idiosyncratic British philosopher whose work helped introduce the Frankfurt School's critical theory and renew interest in Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Jewish thought in Anglo‐American philosophy. After years of relative oblivion, her life and thought have recently received new attention in philosophy, sociology, and theology. However, her work's critical Hegelian contribution to feminist philosophy still remains unexplored. This article seeks to reassess the place and the meaning of feminism and gender identity in Rose's work by addressing both her philosophical writings and her personal memoir, written in the months preceding her untimely death. It argues that although Rose's overall work was not developed in a feminist context, her philosophy, and in particular her ethical‐political notion of diremption, is valuable for developing a critical feminist philosophy that overcomes the binaries of law and morality, inclusion and exclusion, power and powerlessness—and focuses on the meaning of love as negotiating, rather than mediating, these oppositions.

(Un)Disciplined identities - forging knowledge across borders altered states - transforming disciplines from within stories from the field - implementing feminist science studies in the Academy 4 destination - re-integrating science, community and activism.

References to the values of self-ownership and erotic autonomy figure prominently in women's accounts on why they are practicing consensual non-monogamy. Feminist critiques of monogamy demonstrate a long-standing endorsement of the value of erotic autonomy within feminist politics. In this paper, I sketch a genealogy of feminist and queer feminist work that explicitly or implicitly critics compulsory monogamy and/or defends women's non-monogamous ways of life to explore how the nexus of non/monogamy and erotic autonomy has been theorised across different periods and within different strands of feminist politics. I argue that the common concern within this work with systemic oppression, collective struggle and solidarity sustains politicised views of women's erotic autonomy as a relational phenomenon within a multiscalar framework that captures not only intersubjective, but also socio-political dimensions of relationality. Feminist critiques of monogamy thus provide a rich repertoire of political theorising that advocates for the conceptualisation of both autonomy and sexual politics in ways that avoid the shortfalls of individualistic or (liberal) humanistic/intersubjective models. The paper argues that a reappraisal these previous modes of feminist critiques of monogamy would highlight the significance to explore the multiplicity of structural power relations. While much of the early feminist critique of compulsory monogamy has focused on hetero-patriarchal practices of marriage and romantic love, contemporary queer feminist have used intersectional perspectives to highlight the implication of monogamy (or mononormativity) within structural power relations around gender, race, class, and sexuality. This paper aims to underscore the prominence of feminist and queer-feminist voices within the debates on nonmonogamy, contribute to restoring a focus on autonomy within feminist theorising and highlight the relevance of distinctly feminist and queer-feminist notions of relational autonomy for sexual politics and ethics.

Rebecca Tuvel’s controversial “In Defense of Transracialism” has been criticized for a lack of engagement with critical race theory. Disengagement with salient material on race is a consistent feature of the philosophical conversation out of which it arises. In this article, I trace the origins of feminist philosophy’s disengaged and distorted view of “transracialism” and racial passing through the work of Janice Raymond, Christine Overall, and Cressida Heyes, and consider some of the relevant work on passing that is omitted in the philosophy of “transracialism.” Finally, I offer methodological suggestions to avoid such distortions and omissions in feminist philosophy.

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts:Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess(Arendt 1957) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012). Reading Arendt'sVarnhagenand Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.

When considering possible conversations, synergies, overlaps, similarities, conflicts, and distinctions between two subfields or “camps” (Sylvester 2010), the question of limits looms large. Where, why, and how are the limits of feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) currently being drawn, and to what effect? Building upon previous conversations about the relationship between FSS and FGPE, particularly as they were discussed in the Critical Perspectives section in Politics & Gender (June 2015), as well as those about FSS and FGPE more generally, I briefly touch on a few central points regarding the politics of boundary drawing and the practices of feminist research.