In early 2023 Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull—also known as Posie Parker—took her “Let Women Speak” tour throughout Australasia. One of those rallies made international headlines due to the attendance of a small group of neo-Nazis (members of the National Socialist Network) who proceeded to perform Nazi salutes on the steps of Parliament House and on the surrounding streets. At that very same rally an academic philosopher, Holly Lawford-Smith, gave a speech in support of gender-critical feminism. This paper is my attempt to make sense of that moment, through critical engagement with Lawford-Smith’s book Gender-Critical Feminism. Since Lawford-Smith positions her book as a philosophical foundation for the gender-critical movement, my primary goal is to show that this philosophical foundation is both metaphysically and politically flawed. My secondary goal is to consider whether, and if so how, enactment of the philosophical views developed in that book would move us closer to the oppressive world neo-Nazis are trying to bring about.

Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle, Chiara Bottici’s feminist mythology, and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist praxis of hacking, all underscore the importance of working through the myths, codes, and origin stories that discursively form our world. We identify the biblical story of Solomon’s judgment as an origin story which constitutes an understanding of justice in matters of reproduction that is still hegemonic today, and that must be subverted to realize the Black feminist aim of reproductive justice. Through Solomon’s judgment, justice in reproduction got established as what Édouard Glissant terms, an “obsession with the chain of affiliation” inscribed with the “tragedy of miscegenation,” capturing the maternal in the arché-form of the future subject. We differentiate between the patriarchal configuration of “justice in reproduction” and the feminist concept “reproductive justice,” which is a popular, strong, and important activist concept. To arrive at reproductive justice, a “hack” of the patriarchal configuration of justice in Solomon’s judgment is orchestrated: through a radical affirmation of the events of both abortion and birth, we aim to “explode” the narrative code that constitutes the hegemonic patriarchal understanding of justice, in order to liberate the captive maternal and reimagine reproductive justice within a true feminist mythology.

I develop a strategy of resisting oppression that is directed toward expanding the agency of other oppressed agents and is thus unhampered by some forms of internalized oppression. Using Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that freedom is intersubjective, I motivate intersubjective agency expansion which holds that even if internalized oppression has compromised the ability to resist for one’s own sake, oppressed agents can still marshal resistant agency on behalf of others. A secondary upshot of this strategy is that it may help repair some harms of internalized oppression. On this view, both resistance and repair are not solitary acts, but collective efforts. I first motivate the concept of ambiguous agency based on Beauvoir’s discussion of ambiguity and Qrescent Mali Mason’s concept of intersectional ambiguity. Specifically, I argue for the ambiguity between self-regarding and other-regarding forms of agency and hold that internalized oppression may harm the former but not necessarily the latter. I then develop the strategy of intersubjective agency expansion and its two forms: symbolic and direct agency expansion. Finally, I argue that a secondary upshot of this strategy is the repair of internalized oppression, and that this ought to count as a form of resistance to oppression.

Precision medicine (PM) encompasses various emerging, data-intensive healthcare and biomedical research initiatives aimed at tailoring care to individual patient characteristics. While “precision” primarily denotes an epistemological shift in how biomedical research is approached and care delivered, the conviction that PM empowers patients in clinical decision-making is central to its vision as it is taken up across policy contexts. In this paper, I critically assess these promises by drawing on recent engagements in agential epistemic injustice (Lackey 2020; Medina 2022). I suggest that the social, cultural, and epistemological conditions in which the epistemic practice of precision care unfolds are conducive to epistemic injustice. Despite PM’s explicit aims to address longstanding criticisms regarding the disease-centric nature of contemporary biomedical care practices by including person-centered, non-biomedical features in clinical consideration, exploring its underlying logic suggests its epistemic economy is stacked against patients’ epistemic interests. As such, despite its laudable aim of patient empowerment, the exacerbated risk of epistemic injustice might truncate patients’ (epistemic) agency, further disempowering them in clinical decision-making. To conclude, I suggest that the reliance on “empowerment”- and “person-centered care”-rhetoric dominating PM discourse is a case of epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), further discouraging engagement with social, experiential, and phenomenological dimensions of illness, defanging critics of raising those concerns, and impeding the realization of epistemic justice in healthcare.

Through the colonial period in Sāmoa, Christian morality was embedded into Samoan culture. This transformed gender relations, introducing a new, well-disciplined figure of the Samoan woman. Because of this shift, we argue for the need to develop Samoan feminist thought, which is as much a development of new thinking as it is a return to and restoration of Samoan feminist thought already in existence within Indigenous Samoan cosmologies. We contextualize this thinking within a coalition of Pacific, Indigenous, Black, and women of color feminist thinkers. As feminist scholars have established, feminism doesn’t resonate or work with a simple copy and paste to culture and context. Rather, feminisms are contextual and subjective. It is thus imperative that those from within various contexts continue to broaden understandings and conceptualizations of feminism/s, which work toward demarcating spaces for feminist thought that illuminates multiple, diverse, and intersecting subjectivities and positionalities. As such, the task for us as Samoan women, people, and communities is to develop a feminist space that encompasses and fosters a by-us, for-us, with-us approach that challenges coloniality in Sāmoa and articulates feminist possibilities and futures.

The realities of the Anthropocene, from climate change to pandemics to plastics, necessitate substantially different ways of understanding what it means to act in the world today. In response, feminist scholars within the field of new materialism have attempted to rethink the nature of agency and action. This article focuses on two unresolved challenges with their framework: first, it lacks a way to make distinctions or draw boundaries between different entities and actors and, second, it simplifies the relationship between ontology and ethics, implying that an ontological transformation will lead to more ethical and just relationships with the more-than-human world. I argue that to address these challenges new materialism should look to ecofeminism, particularly the philosophy of Val Plumwood; this pairing is especially pertinent considering the often overlooked or downplayed genealogical connections between them. I also argue, however, that new materialism has something to offer Plumwood: its reconceptualization of agency better responds to contemporary circumstances in ways foreclosed by Plumwood’s more limited account. I conclude that a coalition between new materialism and ecofeminism—a new materialism supplemented and modified by aspects of Plumwood’s account—provides valuable conceptual tools with which to respond to the Anthropocene condition.

Using a comparative reading of Antigone and Iphigenia, the paper illuminates how differing modes of finality within a political moment can be construed along gender lines. For feminine characters whose political life never experiences a birth while ensconced in the Athenian apparatus of male political oppression, understanding how Antigone and Iphigenia both become politically born by entering a mode of finality aids in pinpointing one of the very few agentic methods available to women in ancient Athens. Through a careful understanding of Greek tragedy, the place of women in Ancient Athens, and a discussion of views of gender during the time, the paper offers a multi-disciplinary view, understanding the text for what it is within a contemporary reading of gender. What does Antigone’s suicide imply about gendered power inside a political situation and what does Iphigenia’s sacrifice take away? Antigone’s suicide effectively makes her a masculine actor in the eyes of an Ancient Athenian spectator while Iphigenia’s sacrifice is uniquely feminine. This paper also represents preliminary work into the importance and significance of persons who are politically cornered but have open to them an intentional mode of finality.

Theories of moral responsibility have often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might. Recent accounts of oppressive praise have challenged this and demonstrated that oppressive praise will track and enforce oppressive norms. Existing solutions to the problem of oppressive praise have sought either to redistribute praise or to reorient praise to serve emancipatory goals. These solutions fail to acknowledge how emancipatory norms evolve over time, and the relationship between developing norms and developing practices of praise. This paper offers a practice-dependent account of progressive praise as a solution to oppressive praise, that (i) respects agent’s socially self-governed agency and (ii) does not reinforce oppressive norms, but (iii) can contribute to improvements to the social moral ecology.

In this paper, we examine and respond to two concerns associated with gender socialization and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). After providing an overview of feminist theorists’ work on gender socialization and women’s autonomy, we consider the concern according to which women’s choice to use ARTs to have children may be non-genuinely autonomous due to the influence of oppressive norms on this choice. We call this the autonomous-choice concern. In response to this concern, we argue that only subscribing to an overly demanding account of autonomy yields this conclusion and issue a caution about the implications of subscribing to such an account. Second, we consider the concern according to which the investment of public resources to make certain ARTs more widely accessible amounts to endorsing oppressive norms and may indirectly harm infertile and other women by making these norms more compelling. We call this the norm-legitimation concern. In response, we argue that when appraising the adverse downstream effects associated with legitimizing oppressive norms, it is necessary to consider both the costs of compliance and the costs of non-compliance with these norms, and that their consideration requires a differentiated approach. In closing, we consider objections to the arguments defended in the paper.

In this paper, we propose a performative account of hinge epistemology to make the case for a feminist hinge epistemology. We characterize it as follows: 1) there are hinges that enable and govern our ordinary epistemic practices, functioning as rules; 2) these hinges are enacted and actualized in the specific actions of agents that participate in such practices; 3) this makes room for the transformation and emergence of hinges; 4) against this background, we argue in favor of the possibility of feminist hinges. This novel account opens the way for hinge epistemology to be useful for feminist goals in epistemology, which we believe is the ultimate criterion for hinge epistemology to be legitimately feminist.

It is often claimed that gender data gaps (GDGs) are unjust, but the nature of the injustice has not been interrogated. We argue that injustices arising from such data gaps are not merely socio-political but also epistemic: they arbitrarily skew the epistemic landscape in favour of one group over another. GDGs place a greater epistemic burden on women and gender minorities; they have to do more to avoid error and the pay-off is worse: they have a smaller pool of true beliefs on which to act. We suggest that there are both pragmatic and conceptual reasons to differentiate the injustice arising from GDGs from other more familiar varieties (such as testimonial and hermeneutical injustice), and so we introduce the new concept of epistemic deprivation to capture this injustice.