This piece expresses an anger and frustration with the limits of modern European philosophy in relation to the spiritual. I question what theoretical comfort or liberatory potential can be provided by postmodernism, especially within feminist philosophy, in times of great violence and insecurity. I explore how the knower/known dichotomy places some researchers in a dual, sometimes contradictory, epistemological position as a ripple effect of the coloniality of knowledge. Ultimately, I ask what price we pay for knowledges that are ignored or dismissed in order to maintain the illusion of secular reason and the hegemony of European thought.

Autistics are often viewed and treated as a vulnerable population. But what does vulnerability mean in this context, based on first-person, autistic perspectives and our own self-understandings and community-grown reflections, rather than neuronormative expectations? To explore this, we focus on the phenomenon of autistic masking, and what masking and unmasking in different contexts enables and reveals. Drawing on feminist scholarship on conceptualizing vulnerability and treating neurodiversity as an axis of intersectionality, we argue that it is useful to distinguish between what we call openness vulnerability and harm vulnerability, in order to appreciate not only the risks but also the benefits of autistic unmasking. We begin with the notion of neuronormativity, how it is harmful to autistics, and how it institutes an unjust vulnerability economy. We then introduce the concepts of harm vulnerability and openness vulnerability at the core of our argument for a shift in the vulnerability economy toward more just allocations of vulnerability between autistics and neurotypicals. Next, we look more closely at how these unjust vulnerability dynamics play out in the contexts of higher education and healthcare. Finally, we consider strategies for resisting neuronormativity under the non-ideal circumstances of the status quo.

This paper addresses the question of an ethics of fatherhood and develops the concept of feminist fatherhood in response. Such feminist fatherhood is grounded in a notion of feminist masculinity, which draws on feminist ethics and advocates for equality, gender equity, care, and the dismantling of injustice. Fatherhood becomes feminist, then, when fathers embody these ideals in their role as fathers. I propose that feminist fatherhood can be understood across three dimensions. First, feminist fatherhood involves a specific way of relating to one’s children—namely, an engaged, present, and empathetic approach to parenting that aims for equality and justice in child-rearing. Second, feminist fatherhood is reflected in the father’s relationship with the mother and partner. It is also about how caregiving responsibilities and domestic labor are shared. Third, there is a societal and political dimension to feminist fatherhood, which is expressed in fathers’ engagement for gender justice more broadly, and in their support for the structures, institutions, policies, and laws that make feminist fatherhood possible and sustainable.

Mexico’s democratization continues to be marked by a “post-political” landscape that encourages the use of the state and Indigenous forms of self-governance that do not interfere with the market. I suggest the Zapatistas have responded to the limits of both using and refusing the state by “using-fusing-and-refusing.” This strategy entails calling for a redistributive and legally pluralistic nation-state that recognizes Indigenous autonomy while also practicing autonomy without state authorization and nurturing coalitions. Using-fusing-and-refusing is thereby one way by which the Zapatistas have disagreed with neoliberal multiculturalism by foregrounding an alternative to it and disrupting the consensus over who is a political subject and what counts as political. Furthermore, the using-fusing-and-refusing framework allows us to assay the Zapatistas’ surprising bid for an independent candidacy in 2018. Through this bid, Marichuy, the spokeswoman the Zapatistas elected to run for president, enacted a new form of disagreement that decentered the paradigmatic Rancièrean speaking subject by fusing a broader collective story of the pain and rage caused by “capitalist patriarchy” through listening. Lastly, I suggest that an Indigenous Nahua domestic worker named Candy practices using-fusing-and-refusing to raise her daughter while also teaching her the value of listening for collective repair.

Black feminist studies has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years, marked by a pivot from critical theories like intersectionality and identity politics to new materialist themes like social death and the body. Linked to the broader “new materialist turn,” this intellectual movement has insisted on the limits of ideology critique and negative theorizing, urging positive theories which account for complex assemblages between bodies, objects, and the nonbuilt environment. Against this backdrop, black feminist scholars have begun calling for parallel theories, arguing that earlier critical theories failed to sufficiently posit the materiality of the black female body. This climate, I contend, primed the field for the rise of black feminist new materialism and helped effect the concerted decline of black feminist critical theory. A remarkable sea change, surprisingly little has been explicitly written about this topic, leaving the field with unanswered questions about the nature of these schools and their interconnections. This paper proposes to address this limited treatment. My analysis reconstructs these schools of thought, embedding them in their respective intellectual currents—New Materialism and Frankfurt School critical theory. I argue that their essential differences lie most constitutively in their preoccupations and theories of affectation.

Bathroom bills are laws or policies that require trans people to use bathrooms for the gender they were assigned at birth rather than the gender that matches their gender identity. Florida, Kansas, and Texas currently have bathroom bills in place, the UK in all likelihood will soon have such a bill in place. And many other US states have limited bathroom bills in place. Existing philosophical work on bathroom bills by gender-critical feminists Lawford-Smith and Stock has argued that bathroom bills are just or right. This paper argues that bathroom bills breach trans people’s rights, and these rights are not outweighed by other rights or other considerations, so bathroom bills are unjust. First, it argues that bathroom bills violate trans people’s rights to public, civic, or social participation without harm. It then argues that even idealized bathroom bills, very different from those that have been proposed, enacted, and argued for, that require all public spaces to have a plentiful supply of gender-neutral bathrooms designed for trans people to use, would breach trans people’s rights against unjust statistical discrimination. Finally, the paper addresses Lawford-Smith’s and Stock’s arguments in detail. It establishes that these arguments fail to show that bathroom bills are just.

This paper explores the political significance of intuitive eating as a self-care practice in the context of healing from anorexia and bulimia. Feminist philosophers have described how eating disorders emerge in socio-cultural contexts marked by an idealization of thinness, especially in women. Besides this, philosophers and sociologists have spoken about the connections between fatphobia, diet culture, racism, and sexism. Given these claims, I will argue that healing from these disorders can be framed as acts of political resistance. First, I present the notion of self-care and touch on its evolution from an ethical to a political ideal. Second, I describe the socio-cultural origins of the thinness ideal and of fatphobia to show they fuel eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. Third, I introduce Kate Manne’s conception of “bodily imperatives” and describe Audre Lorde’s framing of her struggles with cancer as acts of political resistance. This discussion supports the claim that the self-care practices anorectics and bulimics engage in to recover from disordered eating can be political in nature. Fourth, I entertain and respond to three objections to my view. I conclude that healing from disordered eating is not merely an individual act, but one full of political potential.

The roots of the concept of human dignity have habitually been traced back to Immanuel Kant. However, recent scholarship suggests that this might be a false parentage, and feminist theorists have long criticized the gendered nature of Kantian dignity. This paper suggests looking to another thinker for the origins of human dignity: Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft’s notion of dignity more closely resembles present currents of thought about the concept and offers a sterner defence of moral equality for women as well as men. To demonstrate this, the paper first analyses what Wollstonecraft understood by the term “dignity,” and then explores the wider role that it played in her thought, and especially her analysis of the French Revolution.

This paper explores a dilemma often faced by marginalized groups: how to cope with oppression when doing so necessitates a choice between safeguarding immediate personal well-being and fighting for structural change. While mainstream conceptions of coping take it to be an individual-level phenomenon aimed at maintaining/restoring personal well-being through emotion regulation processes, a recent plea in psychology calls for the “decolonization” of coping, such that collective efforts aimed at liberatory change be construed as genuine instances of coping as well. We provide the first philosophical treatment of “decolonial coping” and assess its merits and drawbacks as compared to mainstream coping. Our focus on coping double binds contributes to the philosophical literature on double binds by broadening the range of scenarios that can plausibly be understood as instances of double binds and the normative analysis of the costs associated with each horn of the dilemma and with the double bind itself. We identify the affective injustice of apt ambivalence, thereby also addressing for the first time the relation between double binds and affective injustice.

This paper examines central themes in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time from the perspective of María Lugones’s account of world-traveling. By thus reading Heidegger through Lugones rather than vice versa—a methodology I call “centering the margins”—I challenge a tendency in comparative work to approach historically undervalued work through a more canonical voice. I argue that doing so has interpretive consequences that tend to be occluded on a standard comparative approach: (i) a critique of the indexed nature of Dasein and the broader Eurocentrism of Heidegger’s project; (ii) a more nuanced account of the methodological value of lived experience; and (iii) a problematization of the early Heidegger’s recapitulation to a unified account of the self. Rather than ameliorate canonical philosophy by offering specifications to insufficiently differentiated philosophical accounts, turning to the margins on this methodology allows us to see where a canonical philosopher resorts to traditional motifs—the dangers of what Lugones calls “ossification in the homeplaces.” The epistemic advantages of marginalization notwithstanding, centering the margins is self-destructive in that the final aim is the dissolution of that dichotomy and the freeing up of new epistemological terrain.

The exclusionary nature of academic philosophy has been well-documented. Not only do disabled and otherwise marginalized philosophers find it difficult to enter the field, but the combination of the current neoliberal structures of the university and the hegemonic nature of disciplinary norms are pushing out those of us who have made it past the threshold. However, philosophy of disability, using disability as method, allows us to trouble concepts such as competence and epistemic authority in ways that challenge how we pursue research and to whom our scholarship is accountable. In this paper, I argue for the necessity to practice diverse types of scholarship to resist these disempowering structures; specifically, I propose podcasting as a type of recreational scholarship, that is, a scholarly praxis that nourishes instead of depleting by embracing playfulness as a methodology. Cripping academic work through the medium of podcasting allows us to understand the liberatory possibilities of crip authorship for the discipline of philosophy and beyond. Through the lens of Maria Lugones’s concept of playfulness and of C. Thi Nguyen’s framework of striving play, I show how podcasting can be a recreational scholarship praxis.

This article examines the intersection of musicology and philosophy by building on Nina Sun Eidsheim’s critique of Adriana Cavarero’s vocal ontology of uniqueness, assessing its strengths and weaknesses while exploring the influence of Hannah Arendt on Cavarero’s thought, with insights from Sophie Loidolt on Arendtian plurality. While acknowledging the challenges inherent in a paradigm where voice reflects the human subject, I show that Eidsheim’s claims against Cavarero are not fully justified, despite Cavarero’s framework inadequately addressing racialized embodiment. To reconcile these perspectives, I reinterpret Eidsheim’s theory of voice as action in terms of Karen Barad’s intra-action. I propose a framework that views voice as a dynamic material-discursive phenomenon, capable of revealing and obscuring the uniqueness of embodied subjects through repeatable vocal scripts. I suggest that vocal uniqueness arises contextually not as a fixed point or an intersection of axes but as a moving topological knot, produced intra-actively in an act of agential cut. While the features of a person’s voice can be delineated in the act of observation, evoking a sense of uniqueness, such delineation does not reveal any kind of unmoving, unmistakable truth—either about the voice or the person who uses it.

A despairing agent might object to climate obligations by framing them as too demanding to be morally required because they give rise to burdensome consequences of despair, like depression. This objection can be refuted on the grounds that it is morally wrong. However, when it is understood as symptomatic of moral injury, an alternative response prioritizing moral repair is illuminated. I consider how the virtue of epistemic humility can promote tasks for repair, like attentiveness to symptoms of moral injury. I see this virtue as a basis for an active form of care for others and the self that resists temptations to refer to this objection.

Infertility and involuntary childlessness are often accompanied by psychological distress. Such distress exhibits gendered patterns: women typically experience greater infertility-related suffering, including while they undergo procedures like IVF, and when such procedures fail. Early feminist critics of reproductive technologies sought to locate and address this suffering in the totality of women’s experience under patriarchy. Contemporarily, a liberal approach to this issue emphasizes the importance of an individual’s reproductive autonomy to engage in infertility procedures as they see fit. In this paper, I suggest that a hidden assumption within this liberal argument, serving as an operant justification for the development and provision of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), is that ARTs promote welfare, or well-being, through the alleviation of infertility-related distress. I explore whether ARTs do appropriately attend to welfare and so meet this justificatory aim. I suggest that IVF, where it is not successful, that is, in the vast majority of cases, does not serve to promote well-being. A comprehensive picture of welfare requires examining the social context in which infertility-related distress operates and in which well-being is thus compromised. Such considerations are essential to forming a holistic picture of well-being and in assessing whether ARTs can meet their welfarist aims.

This paper highlights how fetal ultrasound scanning involves an intrusion upon the integrity of the pregnant person’s body and their psychological space. It contends that this intrusion has the potential to harm the pregnant people subjected to it in medical contexts as a result of the normative practices and interpretative frameworks associated with it. The socio-cultural practices associated with fetal ultrasound pathologize pregnant bodies and perpetuate logics in which pregnant people are subordinated, discredited, devalued, and policed within social relations as women and mothers-to-be. Further, the paper argues that the intrusion of fetal ultrasound is obscured in the medical monitoring of pregnancy where it is taken for granted as a benign aspect of routine antenatal care. Consequently, we contend that fetal ultrasound is a normalized and gendered intrusion that can cause epistemic harm, scaffold obstetric violence, and may sometimes constitute a form of obstetric violence in and of itself.

Recently, social philosophers have argued for a practice-based social ontology that can furnish a robustly social account of oppression and, in turn, illuminate the obstacles to and possibilities for social change. This paper argues for an intersubjective approach to oppressive social practices. Oppressive meanings constitute relationships between agents in ways they neither choose nor decide on; agents uphold those meanings through their relationships to others. This approach, I argue, can illuminate a critical case of an oppressive social practice that revolves around struggles for recognition and the dynamics of social change.

Some may dismiss the prospect of a decolonial transnational surrogacy as a contradiction in terms. After all, there is a parasitic takeover and expansion of the foetus into the host’s body; and the labor is often extracted by those in the Global North from those in the Global South on exploitative terms. However, I claim that a decolonial surrogacy is not necessarily a misnomer nor unimaginable. To either ban surrogacy entirely or allow it fully under the current system falls into the trap of discussing binaries within limited frameworks that decolonialism seeks to resist. I argue that, if there is to be a decolonial surrogacy, it entails a different system altogether. As such, I present a “tripartite-hybrid” model to decolonize surrogacy: an expanded relational unit, basic services, and targeting multiple norm-based hierarchies. While requiring fundamental changes to current conceptions of family and to broader social structures, the proposals together are ways to deal with the “ontological difference” (limki 2018) in surrogacy and to meet decolonial feminist aims. If, and only if, these requirements are met, is a decolonial surrogacy possible.

The framing of the 2015 Rachel Dolezal transracialism scandal as a new kind of “trans moment” relies on a peculiar understanding of transness and Blackness, and the relationship they share. In this article, I analyze the “trans grammar” that structures this post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse, seeking to understand its points of reference in, and implications for, theories of transness and Blackness. I argue the post-Dolezalian transracialism discourse evidences a concern amongst Black trans feminists that the institutionalization of a “trans” concept that indexes always and only a normative figuration of “transgender” is reliant on the abstraction of the racialization of gendered space, and the erasure of Black trans feminist genealogies. I analyze the debate’s use of “trans” as a prefix for descriptors of the phenomenon Dolezal has come to represent and find the most prevalent usages create “trans” as a qualifier that is emptied of conceptual significance and political investments. This grammar, I argue, captures both Blackness and transness as fixed and knowable. Ultimately, the analysis builds an argument that the discourses’ dominant trans grammars rely on and reproduce a deficient theorization of racialized and gendered identities that depoliticizes transness and recreates gendered and Black identities as a priori and immutable.