I bring together the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Elena Ferrante to philosophically analyze envy in girlhood friendships. I compare two kinds of envy: the destructive envy between girls in their mode as object-beings as described by Beauvoir in The second sex (2011); and the more ambivalent form of envy that I identify in Lenu’s friendship with Lila in Ferrante’s The Neapolitan quartet (2012–15) and Beauvoir’s with Zaza in both Memoirs of a dutiful daughter (1963) and The inseparables (2021). Using Beauvoir’s existentialist understanding of subjectivity and freedom in The ethics of ambiguity (1976) and The second sex, I argue that envy for a girl friend’s intellectual abilities can act as an impetus for the girl to pursue new ends in her mode as subject-being, while simultaneously causing her negative feelings. In doing so, I demonstrate that intellectual friendships between girls that feature envy can open up the girl’s situation such that new possibilities of freedom are available to her that may not have been otherwise.

In this article, I identify a conceptually distinct form of epistemic appropriation: the creation and proliferation of the epistemic fata morgana. An epistemic fata morgana is a hermeneutical resource that is hollowed out, stripped of its meaning and political power, and yet, posited as if it were still accessible. This resource is taken up by dominant knowers in a way that preserves only its perception, but not access to it. This process is illustrated by an examination of the resource “sexual harassment” within the university context. The epistemic fata morgana is an important addition to the field of epistemic injustice for it lends itself to highlighting the frustration that is felt by marginalized people, especially within institutional contexts.

(Re)visiting the testimony exhibition part of Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo, I focus on one testimony in particular. This testimony was given by a survivor of the “comfort women” system, a state-sponsored regime of military sexual exploitation and core institution in the Empire of Japan’s expansion 1932–1945. The testimony was then withheld before the exhibition opened. I approach this “withheld testimony” as an invocation of rupture to the time, space, and positionalities informing the museum narrative. The paper interrogates the interplay of the survivor’s act of withholding her testimony, the curatorial decision to represent the absence that followed on the withholding, and the disruption to the museum narrative that the withholding prompts. By exploring the withheld testimony as a speaking silence, visible emptiness, and present absence, the paper offers a rethinking of model victimhood under the comfort women system.

This dialogue between Prof Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University) and Asijit Datta is based on an online discussion, “Ecology, Extinction, and Posthumanism” which took place on the 1st of August, 2020 during the raging days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The transcript echoes Colebrook’s sentiments that the ethical demands of the climate hazard or the imminent extinction cannot be addressed to a particular subject or ‘we’. The predominant tension is concealed in the idea of the human and its values. As humans, we refuse to ask whether there is a future where life continues with endless possibilities for us. For Colebrook, the inability to adopt such a stance emerges from the historical condition that we as language-beings have always been the ones to define life, the ones that are essentially racing towards extinction. Following the extinction experiments of Husserl and Bergson, Colebrook contends that only the death of the ethical and political subject can provide us with alternate modes of survival in this world. This conversation engages with issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, American politics, and post-apocalyptic cinema to arrive at an imagination that requires the annihilation of the human as we know it.

This article examines the United Nations Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security (WPS) and argues for an expansion of existing agendas to incorporate security away from the repetition of militarized security, extractive capital, and Western humanism through attention to maritime security. Drawing on posthuman feminisms, critical ocean studies, and decolonial and queer feminist engagements with the ocean, I propose the identification of the ocean as a legal subject to enact an unmooring of the ways in which gendered security is currently thought about, realized, and deployed in legal spaces. The liberal feminist preoccupation with including women and creating gender parity, the radical feminist legal agenda for addressing sexual violence, and the cultural feminist legal reforms that center women’s differences are challenged as reasserting and reifying the status quo of law and legal arrangements. Feminist maritime security, posthuman, with the ocean as subject, contributes ways to think and know law in new registers and addresses the legacy of humanist exclusions of both human and nonhuman subjects. Furthermore, oceanic subjectivity invites reflection on the necessity of terraqueous thinking for planetary survival.

In this article, I revisit radical, cultural, and lesbian feminist manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Shulamith Firestone’s The dialectic of sex, the Radicalesbians’ “The woman-identified woman,” and “The fourth world manifesto” by Barbara Burris et al. I highlight a historical and political shift from the nonlinear temporality of the feminist revolution to the spatiality of women’s culture. This shift, overlapping with what feminist historian Alice Echols describes as “an eclipse of radical feminism” by cultural feminism, is symptomatic and indicative of an agential crisis emerging from the utopian drive of radical feminism. The failure or indefinite postponement of the feminist revolution pushed radical feminism toward the spatial politics of separatism, in which cultural and lesbian feminists found temporary yet sustainable refuge from a patriarchal society. The cultural feminist politics of the women’s space offered a utopian refuge for radical feminists whose desire for feminist revolution did not materialize. However, it initiated feminist hostility against transwomen, establishing a historical presage of the contemporary anti-trans feminist movement. In revisiting textual remnants of feminist history, this article critically intervenes with contemporary anti-trans feminist discourse that politically appropriates the cultural legacies of radical feminism in its essentialist tropes of “real women.”

When people reach for symbolic language like metaphor in an effort to express their understanding of a complex experience like baby and pregnancy loss it is usually because everyday language is inadequate. We demonstrate how an analysis of people’s accounts of stillbirth, miscarriage and termination for fetal anomaly collected in England suggests a variety of explanations for “what remains” after pregnancy loss. These include bodily traces, ashes, symbolic objects, and social relationships: a range indicative of the different physical, material, and affective elements that inform how a person understands bodily and temporal separation after pregnancy loss. We engage with the work of feminist philosophers who critique models of pregnant embodiment; those who propose parthood, and theorists who argue for more complex models of intercorporeal relationality. We then discuss insights from linguistics about embodied cognition and metaphorical language. Paying critical attention to symbolic language, combined with feminist thinking about intercorporeality, offers a methodology for analyzing the embodied metaphors that people use when they talk about their experiences of pregnancy loss. These articulations about “what remains” support our claim that the intercorporeal model of embodiment should be extended spatially and temporally beyond the moment of physical separation following pregnancy loss.

In this paper, I examine some of the emotional dimensions of oppression under the heading of “emotional alienation.” If the experience of oppression is affectively attuned, then resisting oppression will likely involve dealing with these difficult, often painful, feelings. Resistance may require finding ways of pushing back against their potentially disempowering effects and developing other, more empowering, ways of feeling. Long-lasting forms of social oppression have a strong hold in people’s sense of self. Resistance, then, requires self-transformation. If emancipation requires undoing disempowering emotional patterns, then self-transformation will require “undoing” ourselves. How is this undoing tied to developing a new consciousness? How does developing a “radically altered consciousness” (Bartky 1990) involve radically changing our ways of feeling? In this paper, I will argue that emotional disalienation need not be thought of in terms of suppressing or excising disempowering emotional patterns. I will contend that narrative thinking, as a relational process, can play an effective role in the struggle towards emancipation.

This paper considers the practical application of the metaphor of “good boundaries” for working towards better interspecies relationships and multispecies cultures. Engaged philosophical methods are employed in the context of the author’s family farm with attentiveness towards both multispecies and colonial politics. The analysis centers interspecies relational dynamics across a spectrum of liminal forms of life on “the property,” in the “homestead,” and under the guise of “stewardship.” The paper concludes that the metaphor of good boundaries helps to generate better multispecies entanglements by (i) growing our capacity for ecological thinking, (ii) directing our attention to moral failure, and, at times, (iii) disrupting anthropocentric colonial ideologies and practices.

This paper engages with a series of recent literatures that examine how feminist and queer movements have become agents of nationalism, neoliberalism, and global wars. I argue that, while the critique of intersectionality has attempted to curtail the reproductions of such violence within feminism, it too has not been able to resist cooptations into nationalist and capitalist forms of power. Developing an epistemological critique of intersectionality, I arrive at an analysis of identity politics as an elemental identification with phallic power that erases the feminine. Building on the works of Elizabeth Grosz, Wendy Brown, and Luce Irigaray, I suggest that at the core of such feminist alliances with domination lies an unresolved relation to feminine desire as the desire for a non-identitarian politics.

Luce Irigaray offers a critical account of feminist desire in response to Hegelian, Freudian, and Lacanian models of desire based on lack. However, she reproduces anti-Black and colonial logics within her feminist, supposedly liberatory accounts of desire, thereby creating false utopias and limiting possibilities for liberatory struggle. This article brings Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) into conversation with theorists in critical Black studies. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s articulation of Unpayable Debt (2022) and Joy James’ concept of the captive maternal (James 2015; James 2016; James 2021; James 2022), I offer a radical proposal for the abolition of desire. Following revolutionary abolitionisms’ dual method of destruction and creation, I theorize both the destruction of the death-dealing concepts and practices of desire, as well as a sketch of revolutionary love as the inventive dimension of the abolition of desire. The features of revolutionary love that I engage include a valuing of freedom by any means necessary (including sacrifice) and a commitment to social life that honors and defends unpayable debts. Revolutionary love embodies difference without separability, toward the abolition and decolonization of the (colonial, anti-Black, racial capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal) world as we know it, rather than its reformation.