Many feminist and democratic theorists share the presumption that politics requires a pregiven subject (“women” or “the people”) whose identity is grounded in commonality. Drawing on Linda Zerilli's interventions in feminist debates, Ferguson develops an alternative account of collective identity that emerges instead from multiple, overlapping, and discontinuous social practices. This reconceptualization of identity demands a corresponding reconceptualization of democracy, characterized by the ongoing contestation of the very subject (“the people”) whose existence it presupposes.

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates.

This essay provides a critical analysis of rape prevention since the 1980s. I argue that we must challenge rape prevention's habitual reinforcement of the notion that fear is a woman's best line of defense. I suggest changes that must be made in the anti-rape movement if we are to move past fear. Ultimately, I raise the question of what, if not vague threats and scare tactics, constitutes prevention.

This article seeks to demonstrate the importance of the philosophical work of Mary O'Brien. It does so by showing how O'Brien's work counters Heidegger's strict differentiation between the ancient Greek metaphysics of presence and modern technological thinking. O'Brien's ideas indicate two critical lacunae in Heidegger's interpretation of the ancient Greeks: the latter's attempt to secure paternity and their overlooking of birth as a form of unconcealment. According to O'Brien, the way in which we understand and experience human reproduction influences both our sense of self and our sense of continuity. According to Heidegger, the way in which things are brought forth or unconcealed is fundamental to our being‐in‐the‐world. Neither O'Brien nor Heidegger lived to see the current advancements in reproductive technology, but both would consider them significant and meaningful beyond their social, political, and even ethical implications. Furthermore, recent reproductive technology draws attention to birth as revealing—although as increasingly Enframed. Rapid changes in reproduction may reveal Enframing as Enframing, and also show that technology is not something that we can simply master. But for this to occur, we must take into account the radical critique and rethinking of Heidegger's philosophy implied by O'Brien's thought.

Editor's note: with this essay, Hypatia inaugurates a new column. We welcome musings on the state of the profession, the life of the independent scholar, political activism, teaching, publishing, or other topics of interest to feminist philosophers. We particularly invite submissions that pick up conversational threads begun by earlier contributions to the column, so that Musings becomes a forum for talking to one another. If you have an idea for the column, please tell us about it.

Rada Iveković reflects on the significance of modernity in contemporary Indian philosophy. Where the orient has been figured as the other for western philosophers, she asks how Indian philosophy depicts the west, how philosophers such as Kant have been interpreted, and how thematics such as pluralism, tolerance, relativity, innovation, and curiosity about the foreign have been figured in both ancient and contemporary Indian philosophy. While working on the western side with such authors as Lyotard, Deleuze, Serres, or Irigaray, Iveković doesn't exactly indulge in comparative philosophy. Rather, she tries to make the most of the existing “coincidences,” using both western and Asian thought in order to open a new area for the production of concepts and a new field for philosophy in general.

This article introduces a concept that I refer to as racialized forgiveness. Cases that exemplify certain conditions that I take as paradigmatic of the problem of racialized forgiveness include instances in which: (a) who is forgiven or not is determined by the race of the offender; (b) praise and criticisms of forgiveness are determined by the race of the victim; and (c) praise and criticisms of forgiveness are, at least implicitly, racially self-serving. I argue that this practice is morally objectionable because of its psychological origins, moral failures, and negative effects. Accordingly, in order to dodge these pitfalls, we need to practice forgiveness differently.

Epistemic exhaustion is cognitive fatigue generated by efforts to determine, retain, or communicate what one believes under conditions that make doing so especially taxing. I argue that the creation and maintenance of epistemic exhaustion is a tool that the socially and politically powerful can and do use in order to retain power. I consider a variety of conversational tactics and three circumstances—partisan polarization, epistemic chaos, and epistemic oppression—that can leave people prone to epistemic exhaustion. I survey several common responses to epistemic exhaustion and offer some suggestions for how we ought to respond to epistemically exhausting circumstances.

The paper presents a Wittgensteinian account of the concept woman, in terms of family resemblance. This approach is deemed superior to the Carnapian account, championed by Sally Haslanger, in that it allows for more inclusivity and to locate the source of sexism not so much in the very concept of woman but in the beliefs sexist people have about women. The compatibility of this account with semantic externalism is explored, as well as its relationship with stereotypes and paradigmatic examples of women. It is further shown how present-day attempts to extend the application of the concept of woman beyond human females may be made sense in terms of a change of hinges—that is, of the rules of evidential significance, which a community of speakers brings to bear on the determination of whether a person is a woman. Finally, it is argued that, despite Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical quietism, such an account is politically significant. This in turn shows that in fact Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical pronouncements far from being inimical to political and societal change may in fact be conducive to it.

The concept of possessive power as it manifests in reproduction is the focus of criticism in this paper. The analysis utilizes both positive insights and illustrative mistakes from Beauvoir's account of maternity. An alternative notion of power is proposed to replace possessive power as proprietary control.

Although intersectionality has been widely disseminated across the disciplines as a tool to center women of color's developed perspectives on social reality, it has been notably absent in the scholarship of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. I first examine the causes and processes of the exclusions of women of color feminist thought more generally, and of intersectionality in particular. Then, focusing attention on Black feminisms, I read Sandra Jackson‐Opoku's 1997 novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, with and against Paget Henry's Africana ethnophilosophy. I model an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach to Henry's ethnophilosophy, broadening its philosophical scope by historicizing the liminality that characterizes the realities of many diasporic Black women. I also develop an interpretation of the female protagonists to suggest how many Black women within different historical contexts develop practices to recover African symbolic and discursive registers as a means to claim their subjectivities. Additionally, I challenge Henry's teleological explanation for an increasingly secular Africana philosophical identity.

Joan Scott's poststructuralist critique of experience demonstrates the dangers of empiricist narratives of experience but leaves feminists without a meaningful way to engage nonempiricist, experience-oriented texts, texts that constitute many women's primary means of taking control over their own representation. Using Chandra Mohanty's analysis of the role of writing in Third World feminisms, I articulate a concept of experience that incorporates poststructuralist insights while enabling a more responsible reading of Third World women's narratives.

My mother is losing her mother to Alzheimer's disease. Although my mother feels loss, I am connecting through my (maternal) grandmother to our ancestors, including a deceased father and paternal grandmother. I am also connecting to a daughter who has lost her mother, through a (maternal) grandmother who, through her loss of memory, is more open to kin networks than my mother. Through deepening connections to my maternal grandmother and to my daughter, I feel I am losing my mother. I look to revolutionary mothering as a way to reconnect shattered bonds and find lost mothers. This article honors the important work of Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, and countless revolutionary mothers.

Motivated ignorance is an incentivized absence of knowledge that arises in circumstances of unequal power relations, a self-protective non-knowing which frees individuals from having to reflect on the privileges they have in virtue of membership in a dominant social group. In philosophical discussions, the term “motivated ignorance” gets used interchangeably with “willful ignorance.” In the first half of this paper, using Charles Mills’ (2007) white ignorance as the defining case, I argue that this is a mistake. A significant swath of cases of motivated ignorance are non-willful, or deep, following Rik Peels (2010). But in all cases, benefits accrued to some in virtue of their social position are gained and maintained at the expense of harms to others. In the second half of this paper, I argue that these harms are what ground attributions of culpability in cases of motivated ignorance and drive the normative requirement that the subject know better, so long as the facts in question are ordinarily and easily knowable (in a sense to be specified). Willfulness is not a necessary condition for culpability, even if it is a sufficient one.

In this paper I argue that the pervasive reality of unjust heterosex necessitates greater attention to the concept of “sexual fluency” (Cahill 2014). This paper elaborates on what it means to be a sexually fluent and disfluent subject, and its broader ethical and political significance. As part of this discussion, I explore the relationship between sexual (dis)fluency and embedded imaginaries, and critically reflect on the promise and limitations of particular interventions to disrupt patterns of sexual disfluency among sexual actors.

Victoria Davion confuses seeking approval with the desire for recognition of and respect for one's difference. Ironically, when she asserts that the desire to please others provides an incentive to do well (and thus constitutes a positive aspect of competition) Davion undermines her argument that competition enhances one's sense of self. Rather than enhancing one's sense of self, striving to win approval from others sabotages one's ability to rely on her own judgment and take moral responsibility for herself.