This article treats ambiguous heterosexual experiences—not quite rape, but not quite “just sex” either—as a form of domination, distinct from both coercion and productive power. It argues that if we wish to make sense of the power dynamics involved in these experiences, it may be useful to view the domination that takes place as a kind of interpellation, understood in the Althusserian sense as a mutually constitutive dynamic in which ideologies create “good subjects,” and subjects reproduce ideology. Considering heterosexual domination as a form of Althusserian interpellation enables us to see the power in question as an embodied, intersubjective relation that demands the complicity of dominated persons, with lasting effects on their subjectivity. This approach avoids positing the dominated as helpless victims or passive objects, while bearing witness to and shedding light on their experiences.

In this essay we investigate several moments in Simone de Beauvoir's philosophical and literary texts in which she refers to echoes and echoing. We notice that echoes help Beauvoir to figure and amplify the ethical character of her concept of ambiguity, which is so central to her thought. We argue that, for Beauvoir, literature has privileged access to the ambiguity of existence and therefore maintains a special status in exposing us to alterity and bringing us face to face with ethical responsibility. Considering her literary portrayals of echoing helps to explain why, despite her life‐long philosophical engagement, Beauvoir preferred not to call herself a philosopher. Finally, Beauvoir's phenomenological insight is that in order to carry ethical resonance, the form of a written work must mirror the fundamentally ambiguous or echolalic ontological structure of human existence.

Focusing on a textbook controversy that emerged in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, Mason explores the discursive production of white ethnicity in the rhetorical, visual, and political strategies used during an organized protest against the new multicultural curriculum adopted by the local school board. What the author finds puzzling is the ways in which these productions of “soul” and “nation” enabled unlikely political alliances between national conservative elites and the local, historically left-leaning working class protesters. The author argues that “soul” is reproduced through racialized discourse signifying the spiritual and ethnic purity of whiteness, the consolidation of white ethnicity, and the spirit of white resistance, articulated through campaigns to save children from future captivity in an “alien” world. Through this on-site theoretical analysis, the author demonstrates how a right-wing narrative of victimhood facilitates the reproduction of ethnic identification among the protesters, whose whiteness apparently can be jeopardized by reading the “wrong” books.

In this article I discuss the argument/criticismi'concerns of bisexuality that arise from within progressive communities which already accept gay and lesbian rights. Issues discussed include trust, heterosexuality and the body, the power dynamics of patriarchal oppression and subjective verification. The moon is evoked as a material metaphor for phases and changes. 1 argue that conditions of the world preclude political attachment to an excessively fixed standard of many things, including sexual orientation.

From the beginning of the practice of surrogate pregnancy, ethical approaches to it have included several dimensions. Central issues such as surrogates’ genuine autonomy, the risk of exploitation of people in vulnerable situations, or the legitimacy of the commercialization of the body have kept this debate alive for more than three decades. Among all the conflicts, those related to healthcare professionals involved in the surrogacy process have been less frequently addressed. Which patient(s) should they protect? Whose interests should they preserve, the surrogate mother's or the intended parents’? Are there differences in healthcare provision between regular pregnant women and those who are going to relinquish their babies? Is adequate compliance with the ethical standards of the caregiver–patient relationship possible? In this article, I will address these questions to identify interests and practices at stake in the healthcare context, where an important part of the surrogacy process occurs.

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.

Feminist epistemology aims to propose epistemic reasons for increasing the representation of women or socially subordinated people in science. This is typically done—albeit often only implicitly—by positing a causal mechanism through which the representation of sociodemographic minorities exerts a positive effect on scientific advancement. Two types of causal theories can be identified. The “epistemic diversity thesis” presents a causal path from sociodemographic diversity to scientific progress mediated by epistemic diversity. The “thesis of epistemic advantage” proposes a causal path from social subjugation to capacity for inquiry. The latter theory is defined with substantial ambiguity in the existing literature, and I present an explicit causal reformulation that disambiguates it. The epistemic diversity thesis focuses on the effect of group composition on collective epistemic performance and is largely silent about what kind of characteristics lead to individual epistemic excellence. On the other hand, the thesis of epistemic advantage seeks to identify sociodemographic background conditions that make certain epistemic agents strictly better knowers or inquirers than others and pays little attention to the synergistic effects of diverse group composition. Such a difference in the causal structure reflects the diverging political characteristics of the two theories.

During the early 1970s, the Italian feminist movement opened up to foreign militant contexts. The two crucial interplays were with the American and French Women’s Liberation Movements. The aim of this article is to analyze from a transnational historical perspective the connection between Milanese activists and the French group Psychanalyse et politique led by Antoinette Fouque, which developed through several encounters during a period of a few days. From the French militants, the Milanese women learnt the political practice of unconscious which differed from the more diffuse consciousness-raising technique. From those meetings I reflect on general issues linked to the Italian and French feminist movements of that time: for instance, viewing the women’s separatist communal life both as a response to the New Left’s refusal to take on the peculiarity of women’s oppression and as the positive exemplification of the deconstructive claim that the personal is political. I also consider the contrast between the use of psychoanalysis and consciousness-raising practices, the significance of orality as a feminist means of communication, and the relationship between orality and the later trend of feminist bookshops. The ultimate goal is to understand the political effectiveness and limitations of the transnational feature of those encounters.

Margaret Cavendish is known for her personal allegiance to monarchy in England. This is reflected in her writings; as Hobbes did, she tended to criticize severely any attempt at rebellion and did not think England could become a republic. Yet it seems that Cavendish did have sympathy with some republican values, in particular, as Lisa Walters has argued, with the republican concept of freedom as nondomination. How can we explain this apparent inconsistency? I believe that the answer lies in a lack of fit between the republican theories that were available to her and the values she accepted and according to which she was expected to live her life.

The concept of matricide theorizes the marginal position of the mother within a phallocentric and patriarchal society from a psychoanalytic perspective. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of transformative nonmatricidal processes by analyzing the relations between the psychic and political aspects of these processes. We argue that nonmatricidal spaces can be created through the mobilization of a maternal affect as a care practice that transgresses social and normative boundaries. By reading the biblical story of Moses's birth and childhood, we depict the emergence of a nonmatricidal space and the ways in which this space defies and disturbs social boundaries forced by a heteronormative, phallocentric, and patriarchal law. We draw on Luce Irigaray's and Kelly Oliver's concept of a “loving look” to theorize how maternal affect is mobilized as an ethical and a political commitment, which affirms alternative positions of subjectivity and agency. We conclude by arguing that an integrated account of nonmatricidal relational spaces and maternal radical care practices might offer a wider understanding of the political effects of maternal politics as radical care practices.

In this interview with Kathryn Sophia Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines), Edward O'Byrn discusses Belle's publications from 2010–2017. His questions focus on Simone de Beauvoir and her use of analogy in The Second Sex, along with broader questions that engage Belle's work on existential philosophy, Beauvoir, Black feminism, and intersectionality.

This article reviews three recent books that enhance our understanding of the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray: Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Irigaray Reader (both by Irigaray), and Philosophy in the Feminine, a commentary on Irigaray's work by Margaret Whitford. The author emphasizes a dynamic reading of Irigaray's philosophy and integrates theoretical concepts with poetic/utopian passages from the works.

Women are the fastest growing prison population in Canada and the United States. Women who are criminalized and incarcerated are almost always prior victims of physical and/or sexual abuse, often at a young age. Foucault’s concept of the “carceral society” allows us to understand how people are deemed criminal or innocent based on a hegemonic system of “norms” which reinforce institutional violence. This article details how those who transgress the norms of being white, male, cisgender, neurotypical, and heterosexual (among others) are often subject to violence and criminalized by default, both in their homes and communities, as well as in the eyes of the state. This “home to prison pipeline” (HTPP) is especially harmful for Black women and women of colour, who face multiple, intersecting oppressions of state policy and violence. Rooted in domestic violence and carcerality in the home, the HTPP operates as a system of close surveillance, honing on those who do not conform to institutional norms. This paper is based in the testimony of incarcerated women, and draws on Foucault’s conceptions of criminality, surveillance, and the development of the modern prison, as well as that of feminist and criminology scholars.

This essay suggests that despite the traditional viewpoint that it seemingly supplements patriarchy's consistent marginalization of maternal bodies, masochism, as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, offers the possibility of a maternal subjectivity beyond paternal domination. Deleuze's conception of masochism reveals an innovative way in which to view maternity as a tactical schema that operates through the perverse disavowal and resexualization of patriarchal law in order not only to destabilize its foundations, but to produce a maternal identity of the mother's own creation. This essay will use Ira Levin's horror novel Rosemary's Baby to contextualize an adaptation of Deleuze's theory in order to account for the relationship between mother and child, and the emergent subjectivity the dyad produces. Levin's novel seamlessly showcases how the maternal body is observed and optimized by reproductive technologies in order to produce not only a heteronormative ideal of maternity, but a child who will reflect paternal law. This essay argues that the titular character, Rosemary Woodhouse, establishes a masochistic contract with her son whereby she reconfigures his identity through a perverse disavowal of the Law of the Father, replacing it with maternal authority. Most important, her performance of masochism results in the marginalization of the father, and the emergence of a new maternal identity.