Argues for the importance of the neglected theme of slavery in Antigone.

Looking from a critical race perspective at Wittig’s lesbian, in this article, I draw two conclusions. First, I suggest that it is actually trans exclusionary lesbians' own transphobia that makes them cis-gendered. And second, it becomes clear that the politicisation of choosing and refusing gender needs to acknowledge racism’s shaping role in the construction of gender. My approach not only intervenes in transphobic feminisms that are obsessed with simplistic understandings of sexual violence, but also questions rigid cis/trans binaries and rejects (...) accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of racialisation for the emergence of gender. The main question that I address is: how to conceptualise the complex im/possibilities of refusing and choosing in relation to gender? It is my aim to connect seemingly disparate knowledge productions on genderqueer, trans and other ‘impossible’ genders and sexualities. I am particularly interested in a phenomenon that can be described as ‘lesbian haunting’: the ambivalences one will find in tracing lesbian theory in relation to transing gender. With this, it is my attempt to rethink lesbian, queer and trans feminist approaches on violence, and to investigate the role of sexual violence within broader concepts of violence. More specifically, in order to understand both ‘gender’ and ‘transing gender’ as always already racialised, my approach builds on theories that identify ‘ungendering’ as an effect of normative racial violence (e.g. Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017; Snorton, 2017). (shrink)

Standpoint epistemology is committed to a cluster of views that pays special attention to the role of social identity in knowledge‐acquisition. Of particular interest here is the situated knowledge thesis. This thesis holds that for certain propositions p, whether an epistemic agent is in a position to know that p depends on some nonepistemic facts related to the epistemic agent's social identity. In this article, I examine two possible ways to interpret this thesis. My first goal here is to clarify (...) existing interpretations of this thesis that appear in the literature but that are undeveloped and often mistakenly conflated. In so doing, I aim to make clear the different versions of standpoint epistemology that one might accept and defend.This project is of significance, I argue, because standpoint epistemology provides helpful tools for understanding a phenomenon of recent interest: epistemic oppression. My second goal is to provide an analysis that makes clear how each of the readings I put forth can be used to illuminate forms of epistemic oppression. (shrink)

In this article, I explore, through the novels of Elena Ferrante, the role played by the ‘abject’ in mediating ageing in women, focusing on its role in the movement from a disempowered to a more powerful subject position. The article has three sections. The first describes the role of the abject in constituting the feminine, focusing on the place of temporality and ageing in this process. Represented by the symbolic figure of the hag, the old woman is a source of (...) primal fear which forms the foundation of a violently misogynistic gendered (self-)formation. However, following Barbara Creed, there are two representational forms of the hag, that of victim (hag) and that of monster (Hag), which I argue also suggest alternative subjectivities associated with ageing femininity. In the second section, I explore the movement from one form to the other by means of conceptual models drawn from Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, in which process a battle over the symbolic meaning of abjection is central. Moreover, ageing itself is significant in mediating the shift from an oppressed/fragmented to a powerful/integrated subject position. Whilst the structures of feeling involved in this subjectivity are emergent, fiction and imaginative literature may provide helpful early depictions and in the last section I illustrate the psychosocial domain with material drawn from two early novels by Elena Ferrante. (shrink)

Safer sex has emerged as a collection of practices and ideas deployed to combat the spread of AIDS. Prevention messages and rituals of safer sex each rely on constructing a potential user's relationship to latex devices. This article is based on an analysis of twenty-seven interviews conducted with people in the sex trade. Since sex workers make it their business to exchange sexual services for economic compensation, many have become extremely sophisticated in their innovations and expressions of eroticism using safer (...) sex techniques. Sex workers are one of a group of key knowledge producers focused on safer sexual practices. Their worlds are metaphoric laboratories for empiri cal studies of emergent sexual practices. This article describes the innovations of the use of technologies of safer sex and the configuration of users. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed. However, through induced lactation, adoptive mothers, fathers and trans people have begun breastfeeding with greater frequency. Although breastfeeding is often regarded as a paradigmatic example of sexual difference, it actually exposes the instability of binary categories of sex. Luce Irigaray insists that sexual difference demands a new poetics, a language that is dynamic and fluid, capable of expressing difference while always (...) keeping open the possibility of transformation and change. This article extends Irigaray’s work in order to theorise breastfeeding from a perspective that is both feminist and queer. (shrink)

The term ‘mutual constitution’ appears with regularity in scholarship on intersectionality, but what does it mean? We could not easily answer this question in the usual way – by reading books and articles about it – because the term has not received direct, widespread or sustained engagement in feminist theory. This led us to analyse a wide range of feminist scholarship – the entire set of 379 articles in women’s studies journals that consider both intersectionality and mutual constitution – to (...) determine whether there are patterns and commonalities in the ways this important theoretical term is used. Our analysis reveals that while there is widespread agreement that mutual constitution does not allow for an additive or binary approach, this is the only major point of shared understanding of this term. Scholars disagree over whether mutual constitution is, in fact, the same thing as intersectionality, and in practice, clusters of disciplines use the term with different norms and levels of precision. Because of the explanatory potential of this term in intersectional theory, we recommend on the basis of our analysis that social scientists reconsider the convention of asserting that entities such as race, class and gender are mutually constituted and borrow the methodological tools from feminist historians, literary critics and other humanists that would allow for a genuine determination and demonstration of when entities are mutually constituted. (shrink)

Using Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness as an inspirational backdrop, a novel whose story unfolds on a genderless planet that nevertheless relies on reproductive sex for the sake of generativity, this paper tackles the sex/gender debate, its entanglements with procreation, and its consequences for transgender pregnancies. More specifically, I analyze three issues that pose barriers to thinking about a more inclusive reproductive ethics: state-sanctioned sterilization, non-reproductive futurism, and access to assisted reproductive technology.

This article attempts a cultural analysis of the white wedding as an event that can be viewed as the crystallisation of several moments of identification, both temporal and spatial. Written in three sections, each located within a different philosophical literature, the article focuses on the significations that surround the emblem of ‘the hand’, playing on all the associations that gather around that emblem, and making critical consideration of a series of crucial boundaries of cultural differentiation.

In a recent issue of Feminist Review Camille Guy argued, focusing on selected controversies in New Zealand and Australia, that radical feminists have had a prescriptive hegemony in defining issues of sexual abuse, and that this has resulted in injustices and a censorious climate in which people who disagreed were too intimidated to speak out. This article replies to Guy's assertions and, while disagreeing with much of her argument, also suggests that it does point to more broadly sig-nificant issues for (...) feminists trying to analyse and oppose sexual violences at the end of the twentieth century. These include the legacy of the western feminist sex wars in a frequently polarized set of approaches to sexual abuse controversies, and the usefulness of postmodern/poststructuralist theories in helping feminists to make sense of the increasing complexities of the relationship between the mass media and feminist discourses against rape and child sexual abuse. (shrink)

This dissertation contributes to the development of philosophy of disability by drawing on disability studies, feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of biology in order to contest epistemic and ontological assumptions about disability within biomedical ethics as well as within philosophical work on the body, demonstrating how philosophical inquiry is radically transformed when experiences of disability are taken seriously. In the first two chapters, I focus on epistemological and ontological concerns surrounding disability within biomedical ethics. Although disabled people and their advocates (...) have been quite vocal regarding their views on disability and in critiquing bioethicists’ approaches to issues that affect them, the interests, knowledge, and experiences of disabled people have had minimal impact on discussions within biomedical ethics textbooks. The risks of making problematic assumptions about disability are high within this subfield insofar as bioethicists impact practices within medical facilities, public policy, and, through student engagement with their texts in biomedical ethics courses, the views of potential health care professionals. All of these, in turn, affect the care provided to disabled people and potential/actual parents of disabled children. Chapter three raises ontological issues related to disability theory, examining the role of the impairment/disability distinction in framing discussions of the body as well as the status of experience. I discuss two approaches to incorporating subjective experiences of the body in disability, arguing that neither is sufficient. I examine debates within feminist theory on questions related to experience. I argue that a feminist phenomenological approach that builds on Merleau-Ponty’s work offers the best way to address bodily experiences in disability theory. The assumptions that disability theorists and Merleau-Ponty make about disability are often at odds. Chapter four points out the ableism in Merleau-Ponty’s use of a case study and considers some of the oversights within Phenomenology of Perception. In spite of my critique, I argue that his approach to phenomenology—with appropriate modifications—is useful not only for theorizing the experiences of disabled people but also for addressing other types of marginalized embodiment. Chapter five applies this method to body integrity identity disorder (BIID), arguing that combining Merleau-Ponty’s insights with those of disability theory allows us to address lived experiences of BIID and to identify assumptions about disability within research on this condition. (shrink)

The characters of tragedy are in some sense responsible for their errors. However, given their ignorance of the consequences of their actions, it seems that they ought not be held responsible by others for what they have done. This is a paradox. The way to resolve the paradox is to distinguish two kinds of agent responsibility: accountability and culpability. Being accountable is primarily a private affair, whereas being culpable entails the possibility of just punishment.